The Chronology

EXHIBIT I · THE TIMELINE

Every dated fact in this case file, on one axis. Read top to bottom and the story stops being a pile of exhibits and starts being a sequence. Each entry is graded by how we know it — and nothing here is inferred beyond what the source actually says.

How we know:On tapetheir own recorded wordsPublic recordGitHub, arXiv, HuggingFace, DNSOfficial postPearl's own announcementOur readclearly-labeled inference

Apr2025

The paper that starts everythingPublic recordResearch

Pearl-GEMM / proof-of-useful-work lands on arXiv (2504.09971) — PoW on arbitrary matrix multiply A×B with vanishing overhead, miner chooses (A,B).

Apr2025

NVIDIA Inception bars crypto startupsPublic recordBusiness

As of April 2025, cryptocurrency companies are on Inception's published list of excluded business types. Remember this date.

Feb2026

First engineer on the benchPublic recordThe bench

Earliest dated bench member in public commit history (GPU kernel engineer). The first Pearl model checkpoint — Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct-pearl — is published the same month.

Mar2026

“Initial Pearl implementation”Public recordThe bench

The infra/DevOps engineer's very first commit message. The repo that becomes the chain starts here.

Apr2026

The bench doublesPublic recordThe bench

Protocol and mining-systems engineers join. Two more model checkpoints published (Gemma-4-31B, Llama-3.3-70B).

May2026

ZK and client engineers joinPublic recordThe bench

Cryptography/ZK and desktop-client hires. Six of fifteen bench members have dated starts; all six fall in Feb–May 2026.

MLSys2026

Hawkeye presented at MLSys 2026Public recordResearch

Reproducing GPU-Level Non-Determinism — Research-Track oral plus poster. Authors include Stanford's Dan Boneh and co-founder Ilan Komargodski. The paper never says “blockchain.”

Jun2026

The usefulness-gap critiquePublic recordResearch

Basu's critique (arXiv 2606.04819) argues PoUW schemes don't deliver genuinely useful work — the standing academic objection to the whole category.

Jun 82026

Rafael Pass paper on PoUW economicsOfficial postResearch

Answers the “if miners already get paid for AI work, does security collapse?” objection.

Jun 112026

MoE checkpoint publishedPublic recordProtocol

Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507-pearl — a real mixture-of-experts checkpoint — published to HuggingFace.

Jun 122026

The MoE hard fork shipsOfficial postProtocol

Network moves v1 (generic matmul) → v2 (MoE certificates), governed by PIP-2. Pearl can now mine mixture-of-experts models.

Jun 162026

Vision support addedPublic recordProtocol

Ongoing model work — real commits, not a launch dump.

Jun 182026

BLAKE3 GPU-kernel writeupOfficial postResearch

Engineering blog on their hashing kernel implementation.

Jun 282026

Benchmark results publishedPublic recordProtocol

Added to the model cards.

Jun 292026

“Money, rethought”On tapeResearch

First of three teaser clips cut from the keynote, released ahead of the full talk.

Jul 12026

“They were wrong”On tapeResearch

Omri on PoUW being repeatedly declared impossible — including Vitalik's “probably infeasible.”

Jul 22026

Pearl-GEMM explainedOn tapeResearch

The low-rank-noise trick, in his own words. Same day: congratulations to partner Together AI on an $800M Series C.

Jul 62026

Rafael Pass on the economicsOn tapeResearch

Full 34-minute talk posted — the security-collapse objection, answered on tape.

Jul 92026

The keynote dropsOn tapeResearch

“The Science Behind Pearl” — the full ~40-minute talk, and the source of every teaser clip. Also the tape where the CEO describes his own invite-only audience.

Jul 142026

Inference cloud + mining rewardsOfficial postBusiness

Discord announcement on the compute marketplace direction.

Jul 152026

NVIDIA Inception — and “Indeed”Official postBusiness

Pearl announces Inception membership. A crypto commentator notes Inception bars crypto and that Pearl is “functionally an AI inference company.” Pearl's verified account replies: “Indeed.” Fifteen months after the exclusion policy, the workaround is confirmed by the company itself.

Jul 162026

Floating-point roadmap goes publicOfficial postProtocol

Komargodski: next-gen PoUW will support FP natively — FP8 first, FP4 to follow — removing the quantization step. This is Hawkeye shipping as product.

Jul 192026

Wallet v2.0.3Official postProtocol

Routine client release.

Jul 202026

The W7A7 quantization formatOfficial postProtocol

Komargodski: PoUW forced them to invent a quantization format that didn't exist — GPTQ + SmoothQuant fused, claimed to beat FP8 baselines. Paper promised.

Jul 212026

The roadmap, in their own wordsOfficial postProtocol

A Pearl Discord roadmap post splits the work in two. AI: inference optimisations, floating-point support, and “exploring distributed inference architectures.” Crypto: exploring L2 and stablecoin frameworks, and building relationships with qualified custodians to support institutional adoption.

Jul 212026

An L2 is on the tableOfficial postProtocol

Same day: “the current structure of the blockchain is not a good fit for agentic payments, or even regular payments, so it makes sense to develop a faster L2.” Open questions posted to the community include whether to reuse Bitcoin-L2 architectures, whether it needs smart contracts, whether it can mint other tokens, whether Pearl needs a native stablecoin, and whether to issue an asset pegged to the value of a GPU.

Jul 212026

Inside a closed NVIDIA eventOfficial postBusiness

A photo posted to Discord puts CEO Omri Weinstein on stage with Prof. Freddy Gabbay — Hebrew University, formerly VP of Chip Design at Mellanox, the networking-silicon company NVIDIA acquired — discussing “the intelligence economy” at a closed NVIDIA event.

Jul 212026

On the circuitOfficial postBusiness

The same roadmap post lists where the team has been showing up: the RAISE AI summit in Paris (attended), AMD Advancing AI in San Francisco (that week), and GTC among others — plus “a strong network of advisors” producing meetings with senior AI-company executives. Their own caveat: they can't discuss what was said in those meetings.

Jul 212026

Stable diffusion as a 2-for-1 use caseOfficial postResearch

A brief note that they're working on stable diffusion, called “a great use case for the 2-for-1 model” — image generation as mineable work, not just LLM inference.

Jul 242026

The MoE mining exploitOfficial postProtocol

Official statement: an exploit in the MoE mining mechanism let certain miners generate disproportionate hashrate. Mitigated by a soft fork that temporarily disables MoE mining while a permanent fix is built. A technical report was promised for the following week.

Jul 262026

The MoE post-mortemOfficial postProtocol

The promised report lands. Pearl's own account: the soft fork went in at noon on 23 July, hours after the vulnerability was identified that morning with community help. MoE proofs ran at 28% of newly mined blocks across the affected period and peaked at 73% on fork day; 4.8M coins were minted with the vulnerable construction, ~0.23% of total supply. Root cause: sharing the commitment and noising of the activation matrix across experts to cut overhead introduced a uniqueness condition — each token routed at most once per expert — that the verifier never enforced. Pearl reports no reorg, double-spend, theft, forged transactions or key compromise, and no change to the emission schedule; the stated harm was reward dilution for honest miners. MoE mining stays off pending a revised construction and external review, with a bug-bounty programme promised.

Sep 12026

The window opensOur readBusiness

The date the countdown runs to — the AMA's own “September” marker for the next phase.

What we still don't know

An investigation is defined by its holes. These are ours — open, unresolved, and the fastest way to help.

Who was in the room?

The CEO said a lab spending $100–130M a day on inference was in the audience. That's a club of about five companies. We don't know which one.

Identify an attendee

Which hyperscaler signed?

One of two agreements was described as being in “advanced progress” the week of the AMA. Still unannounced.

Name the counterparty

What broke in the MoE mechanism?

The exploit let some miners generate disproportionate hashrate. Root cause is still unpublished.

Point us at the report

Which chip-maker collaboration?

A joint reveal was promised roughly a month out from the AMA. The clock is running.

Tell us what you've seen

KNOW ANY OF THESE? THE TIP LINE IS ANONYMOUS AND TAKES FILES — DROP A LEAD.