Pearl's market cap is 7.3 times Nockchain's, and the two chains share miners

At 12:05 UTC on October 10, CoinGecko’s five-minute market data valued Pearl at $464.5 million and Nockchain at $63.6 million.²⁰²¹ This means Pearl’s market capitalization was 7.3 times Nockchain’s. The two chains also share miners, as we explain later in this piece.

The gap was much smaller three months ago. Measured at 00:00 UTC each day, the ratio stood at 2.1x on July 21, 1.1x on September 13 and 9.9x on October 9.³⁴ NOCK’s price then rose from $0.01987 at 00:00 UTC on October 9 to $0.02708 at 12:05 UTC on October 10, bringing the ratio back to 7.3x.³²¹

Date (00:00 UTC unless noted)	Pearl market cap	Nockchain market cap	Ratio
Jul 21	$74.0M	$34.6M	2.1x
Aug 14	$66.3M	$21.1M	3.1x
Sep 13	$127.6M	$116.8M	1.1x
Oct 9	$460.2M	$46.6M	9.9x
Oct 10, 12:05	$464.5M	$63.6M	7.3x

On hourly data, NOCK’s low in the window was $0.00823 at 11:00 UTC on August 14.⁵ Its high was $0.05326 at 02:00 UTC on September 13.⁵ It traded at $0.02708 at 12:05 UTC on October 10.²¹ On CoinGecko, Pearl’s all-time high is $1.76, set on September 23.¹

How the two chains share miners

Nockchain’s Logos upgrade added an AI proof-of-work lane. Its certificate binds the same parameters a Pearl proof binds, so one unit of matrix-multiplication work can count on both chains.⁶ A miner commits to the Nockchain block inside the Pearl coinbase under a tag, NOCKCHAIN-AI-POW-AUX. The tag can appear only once, so one Pearl proof authorizes one Nockchain block.⁶

Nockscan’s merge-mining data, fetched at 12:47 UTC on October 10, shows how much of each chain this covers. Its scan window holds 10,000 blocks. Of the 7,043 Nockchain AI blocks in that window, 7,042 declare a Pearl commitment. Over the seven days to that time, 1,759 of 3,206 Pearl blocks carried the Nockchain tag. That is 54.9% of them.⁷

Logan Allen wrote the Logos specification.⁶ Allen’s X profile reads “Founder @nockchain”.⁹ On October 4, Allen described the compatibility as a starting move: “Bootstrapping our AI puzzle with Pearl merge-mining compatibility was a tactic chosen to broaden mining distribution and improve initial network security.”⁸

What Pearl is

Pearl is a layer-1 proof-of-work chain whose code timestamps its mainnet genesis block at 09:00 UTC on April 27, 2026.¹⁰ Its mining protocol comes from a 2025 paper by Ilan Komargodski and Omri Weinstein on proofs of useful work from matrix multiplication.¹¹ Pearl’s current whitepaper, dated September 2026, specifies FP8 matrix multiplication as the unit of mining work.¹² An FP8 fork sits on an unmerged branch of Pearl’s code. As of October 10, it had no mainnet activation height.¹³

Nockchain’s AI lane binds Pearl’s integer (INT8) parameters.⁶ If Pearl activates FP8 on mainnet, merge-mining would then depend on a matching Nockchain update. That is Nocktane’s inference. As of October 10, Nocktane found no statement from either team saying so.

A separate issue is open on Nockchain’s GitHub, filed October 7. It reports that some Pearl merge-mining candidates pass the work target and then fail Nockchain’s proof verification. As of October 10, it had no replies.¹⁴

The third chain

FLOP is the newest of the three. Flop Labs announced the Flop Network on August 18.¹⁵ In a post the same day, Arthur Hayes wrote “I’m coming out of retirement to lead @flop_labs” and gave a genesis target of “Q1 27”.¹⁶ On September 7, Hayes linked a project introduction at flop.finance/intro.¹⁷ That page now carries a “Draft whitepaper” label, and the current whitepaper draft is dated September 25.¹⁷¹⁸

In FLOP’s design, AI agents are the buyers. They pay miners in FLOP to run inference on a named model. Miners must show that the requested model ran. They do this through commitments to the model’s internal activations and optimistic re-execution with slashing, settled by a validator quorum.¹⁸¹⁹

Pearl’s protocol verifies the miner’s matrix multiplication.¹² FLOP’s design checks that the requested model produced the inference.¹⁸ Nockchain merge-mines Pearl-compatible work today. Its roadmap lists a “Useful Inference Routing Protocol” for Q4 2026, “a major milestone that funnels compute demand into the AI Compute Network”.²²

Of the two chains that trade, the market prices Pearl higher. At 12:45 UTC on October 10, CoinGecko listed FLOP as a preview with no price.²³ Nocktane does not forecast prices.