A geographic view of every Pearl full node we've ever seen — both the ones currently connected to our gateway (green) and the wider topology of the network discovered through gossip and addrman walks (faint blue). Currently 216 nodes are known, of which 216 are geo-located.
Most chain explorers show only the nodes they're directly connected to — typically 8–12 peers. We go further: every hour, our full node walks its addrman table via the getnodeaddresses RPC. That table contains every IP the node has ever heard about — through DNS seeds, gossip from existing peers, or historic connections. Each new IP is geo-located via ip-api.com at a respectful 1.5-second pace and the result is cached forever (IP geolocations don't change).
Over time, this builds up a near-complete picture of where Pearl is being run from, even for nodes we've never directly connected to.
| Country | Nodes | Share |
|---|---|---|
| United States | 110 | 50.9% |
| Germany | 36 | 16.7% |
| Taiwan | 24 | 11.1% |
| United Kingdom | 17 | 7.9% |
| Finland | 8 | 3.7% |
| India | 7 | 3.2% |
| France | 3 | 1.4% |
| Netherlands | 2 | 0.9% |
| Canada | 2 | 0.9% |
| The Netherlands | 1 | 0.5% |
| Belgium | 1 | 0.5% |
| Mexico | 1 | 0.5% |
| Brazil | 1 | 0.5% |
| Japan | 1 | 0.5% |
| Chile | 1 | 0.5% |
A blockchain is only as censorship-resistant as its node distribution. If 80% of nodes were in one country, that country could in principle force-fork the chain through legal pressure. Pearl's spread across 16+ countries (so far) makes this kind of jurisdictional capture much harder.
Hashrate, by contrast, is harder to map — it depends on where individual GPU rentals (RunPod, Vast.ai, etc.) physically run, not where miners log in from. The node map shows where the network's verification is distributed, not where the work happens.
Running a Pearl full node is straightforward — pull the latest binary release, run pearld --daemon, and let it sync (~2 hours from genesis on a fresh box). The more independent nodes the network has, the stronger its resilience. See the single-GPU setup guide — it covers full-node setup as the first step.