PEARL’s price fell more than 35% over 10 days, alongside a decline in network hashrate and per-card mining revenue. According to PANews, the lag between price movements and network difficulty adjustments has squeezed miners’ returns, with newer entrants more likely to lose money. Home miners who have already paid for hardware may remain profitable if they only cover electricity costs, while some large-scale mining operations are shifting to AI services after weighing the opportunity cost. Short-term cloud-computing renters have been the first to exit, while miners with longer-term contracts are staying. More than 90% of the network’s hashrate is not performing actual AI computations, and daily token issuance adds potential selling pressure; early tokens without lockups and a mining pool controlling nearly half the hashrate are also cited as risks. PEARL’s future depends on whether it can attract real demand for AI inference.