Last weekend, I met in person with @0xYuxi to discuss Pearl, and we summarized it as a “scam of the century,” adding several new perspectives beyond the research presented in the video. First, both founders are Israeli—everyone who knows understands what that implies. The $130 million VC funding is real; major Silicon Valley VCs like Ribbit and LightSpeed genuinely bought into Pearl’s “AI Bitcoin” story. Second, Pearl appears to have direct or indirect ties to Google and NVIDIA. Finally, if Pearl were to be put into practical use, Yuxi offered an intriguing angle: cloud service providers. Cloud providers could run all their “AI inference” tasks on the Pearl chain, because for them, it means an additional stream of PEARL revenue—essentially free money. But this also creates real selling pressure, since the PEARL token currently has no utility and offers no staking rewards. Anyone who mines it or earns rewards through AI inference can simply withdraw and sell it immediately. Pearl operates entirely on consensus, much like BTC or ZEC. Isn’t that exactly how most “scams of the century” work? No utility = maximum utility—it’s all about how the money is pumped!