not officially confirmed, but @TheMarker, israel's main business paper, is reporting that @prlnet's lab raised $130M from lightspeed, ribbit capital, and square peg. $55M in equity and $75M for a fund to build out GPU infrastructure. ribbit and lightspeed are also named as pearl backers on its profile in greenfield partners' disruptors 60 list. if this is real, the $PEARL bear case gets a lot worse. here's why: 1) $PEARL traded on a "no VCs, fair launch" story. pearl's code doesn't allocate tokens to founders or investors, and that part is probably still true. but the lab behind pearl is reportedly VC-backed, and nobody corrected the narrative while it pumped. 2) the value goes to the equity, not the token. the lab sells inference and gets paid in USD, and the VCs own the lab. $PEARL holders don't get any of that revenue, just diluted by new supply. so the investors can do well even if $PEARL goes to zero. 3) it goes against the "sovereignless bitcoin" pitch. part of bitcoin's monetary premium is that no company controls it. pearl's upgrades are drafted by a VC-backed lab, including the FP8 fork that would tie mining more closely to inference, the same business the lab sells. 4) the $75M GPU fund. we don't know if those GPUs mine $PEARL. if they do, the company is collecting a share of ~85% supply growth this year, on top of whatever insiders mined early. remember that about 1/3 of today's supply was mined in the first 6 days. 5) zcash had investors too (20% of its early block rewards went to founders and investors) but that was public from day 1. everyone knew who got paid and how much. pearl hasn't disclosed any of that. holders deserve to know: > who invested > whether any investors or insiders hold $PEARL > whether the GPU fund mines $PEARL a fair launch shouldn't need a newspaper to tell you who's behind it. i was a $PEARL bear on friday. i'm a bigger one now.