Yeah listen, the new puzzle they shipping for AI is gonna be very useful. It's already started — Pearl and NOCK both racing for share in AI inference market. Pearl has been live with MatMul mining for 3 months, NOCK activates AI inference market in week or two.
The way I see it, NOCK is asymmetric bet because it's $64M MC vs Pearl $1.4B FDV. Same useful work thesis, 30x cheaper. Two scenarios you win:
1) NOCK wins the AI inference race — biggest payoff
2) Pearl wins but NOCK has same thesis — you still profit as beta play
About the proofs — right now NOCK proofs are more like stress testing the infrastructure. Real external demand for those proofs is still small. But that changes when AI inference market goes live. Then every GPU running ChatGPT, Claude, Llama style inference can mine NOCK while serving customers. No second machine, no second power bill.
Bigger picture — compute market is exploding. Larry Fink calling compute futures a new asset class. AI inference market alone is $110B today going $255B by 2030. Plus ZK proving, render, scientific compute, agentic verification — total addressable market $300-500B by 2030.
NOCK is positioned for ALL of those with one token. Not just AI like Pearl. Modular consensus means they can plug in new compute markets without changing the chain. AI is just the first.
Then you got halving in 6-9 months (50% emission cut), Phase 2 already shipped, PMA shipped (node RAM went from 34GB to 1.8GB), fair launch, no premine, no VC.
At $64M MC for largest proving network on earth and asymmetric exposure to compute economy — math don't lie bro.
NFA but I see this as the cleanest asymmetric bet in crypto right now.
