Ryan LeFevre

44% of public miners' MW is contracted to AI/HPC in 2026-28, as they pivot toward more profitable operations leveraging sites for AI. With mining costs already near $75k and the 2028 halving approaching, this will only worsen. Pearl's FP8 removes this risk. Instead of forcing miners to choose between mining BTC or providing inference (useful work they get paid for), they can do both: mining PRL requires the same matrix calculations as AI inference. As public companies that maximize the value of their hardware, it's clear to me that these players will mine Pearl in addition to their inference work. There are three bull cases for this: 1. Store-of-value assets lack clear valuation frameworks, and hashrate is the "hardest" quantifiable metric available. While not an ideal comparison, Pearl, with significant hashrate from miners that opt in, would be extremely undervalued on this basis. 2. Alternative SOVs have emerged as alternatives to BTC, attempting to solve some of the issues its ossification presents. These assets have, however, been constrained on the network security and hashrate side. Pearl, by making hashrate acquisition trivial, removes this constraint, allowing innovation in newer SOVs without the security bottleneck. Like ZEC, for example, Pearl is also targeting quantum resistance. 3. Alignment. Assets like BTC gain value because others believe in them and give them value (e.g., why does ZEC have more value than XMR?). Just as naturally as existing BTC miners will provide security for Pearl, it follows from the same first-principles thinking that they maximize their expected value, and so they become strong and powerful advocates of the coin. This makes a compelling bull case: Pearl, like ZEC, is a modern SOV that is able to react to a changing technological landscape, targeting things like quantum and potentially privacy. However, it also has no network security concerns, a very clear path for hashrate and network security expansion, and will likely have huge BTC miners and potentially AI data centers as advocates. It is also 1/30th the market cap of ZEC. At the end of the day it is ultimately just a memecoin (like BTC). But a memecoin with an incredibly compelling narrative, and likely a narrative very influental entities will rally behind.