Redefining the unit economics
of AI.
- PoUW
- Consensus
- MatMul
- Workload
- PRL
- Cryptocurrency
Secures every block.
Runs on every GPU.
Mined with every inference.
Since the beginning, proof of work has demanded a simple, brutal trade-off: to keep a monetary network secure, you have to burn enormous amounts of energy - as much as entire countries.
While crypto burned power to secure transaction records, hundreds of billions of dollars were flowing into data centers and chips to build AI, all in service of one operation repeated at unimaginable scale: matrix multiplication.
For years these two efforts ran side by side with nothing to do with each other. It was widely believed to be mathematically impossible for proof of work to be proof of useful work. They were wrong.
The same matrix multiplication that powers AI can, at the same moment, secure a monetary network - every GPU cycle doing double duty. A currency built for the age it lives in, backed by the most valuable computation in the world. All that was missing was the math.
Proof of Useful Work
How the matrix multiplication behind every AI workload becomes the work that secures a blockchain, and why that matters now.
Pearl and the price of compute
Rafael Pass on the classic critique of useful work: why zero-marginal-cost mining does not drive a network’s security budget, or its currency, to zero.
Open problems
Frontier problems in mathematics, cryptography, and consensus.




