Pearl or Quantus on your GPU: what Pearl's planned FP8 fork means for RTX 30 and RTX 40 owners
GPU mining has a real story again. Two young coins, Pearl (PRL) and Quantus (QUAN), now top the profitability tables for recent NVIDIA cards, idle rigs are coming back online, and on October 24 2Miners opened a Quantus pool. At the same time Pearl is preparing a hard fork that, as currently written, would leave the RTX 40 and RTX 30 series behind. Here is how the two coins differ and what to check before you point your cards at either of them.
Two very different kinds of proof of work
Pearl launched its mainnet on April 27, 2026. Instead of hashing, miners multiply large matrices, the same math that runs AI models, so tensor core performance decides who earns the most on the pearl-pow algorithm. That is why the RTX 5090 leads by a wide margin and AMD cards trail far behind. Maximum supply is 2.1 billion coins.
Quantus went live on September 9, 2026. It signs transactions with ML-DSA, the post-quantum standard published by NIST, and is mined with a plain Poseidon2 hash: a 12-second block target, a 21 million coin cap and no dev fee taken from the block reward. NVIDIA, AMD and Intel Arc cards can all mine it, with NVIDIA ahead on efficiency.
Which coin pays more
It depends on the card, and the order can flip from one week to the next. In MinerCompare's October table at $0.10 per kWh, the RTX 5090 made $10.09 a day on Pearl against $7.11 on Quantus, and the RTX 4090 $7.69 against $7.18. On the RTX 5080 and the RTX 3090 Quantus was slightly ahead: $4.87 against $4.69 and $2.31 against $2.22. Kryptex lists the RTX 5090 at about 400 TH/s on Pearl and 1,813 MH/s on Quantus as of October 24.
Read these figures as snapshots, not forecasts. New proof-of-work coins pay the most in their first weeks: back in May, Tom's Hardware reported that the RTX 5090's daily revenue on Pearl had already halved, from $33.80 to $17.19, as difficulty climbed.
The PIP-3 fork: which cards stay on Pearl
PIP-3 moves Pearl mining from INT8 to FP8 math. It is a consensus hard fork: from the activation height only version 3 certificates are valid. Because the verifier has to reproduce floating-point results bit for bit on the committed hardware, the hardware is whitelisted, and the draft supports only NVIDIA Hopper and Blackwell.
- Keep mining: RTX 50 series, RTX PRO Blackwell, H100/H200 and B200/B300. According to Kryptex Pool, the founders confirmed the RTX 5090 and RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell at a September 15 AMA.
- FP8 in hardware, but not listed: the RTX 40 series, including the RTX 4090, plus AMD RDNA 4 and Instinct MI300/MI350. As written, they stop mining Pearl at the fork.
- No FP8 at all: RTX 30 and RTX 20, A100, CMP mining cards and older AMD Radeon cards.
The key detail: PIP-3 is still a Draft, created on July 30, 2026, and it has no activation height. The team has said it will upgrade the network only once it is confident in the implementation's security. Until then every card that mines Pearl today keeps mining, as PearlStation also notes.
What to do now
- RTX 30 and RTX 40 owners: mining Pearl now is fine, but keep Quantus set up as a fallback. SRBMiner-Multi supports Quantus from version 3.6.4 with a 2% dev fee.
- Buying hardware: do not buy RTX 40 or older cards just for Pearl. Under the current draft they would lose it at the fork.
- Watch the PIP repository: an activation height and a node release have to appear well before the fork, so there will be time to switch.
- Choose the payout scheme: on 2Miners the Quantus PPLNS pool charges 1% and the solo pool 1.5%, with payouts every 2 hours from 0.1 QTC.
- Recalculate: plug in your own electricity price and the current difficulty before committing a rig.
One last trap: Quantus shows up as QUAN on some sites and QTC on others, and QTC is also the ticker of the unrelated Qubitcoin. Double-check which coin a wallet, pool or exchange means before sending funds.