Not everything here is an investigation. Some of it is just good story. These are the origin bits — the names, the myths, the why — told by the team themselves in the public Discord. The board can wait. Pull up a chair.
“Pearl is a pretty obvious choice.” — here is the analogy, exactly as the team told it.
A pearl is a scarce, natural resource — and it's the by-product of an oyster defending itself, layer by layer of nacre. It takes real energy to collect one: free-diving is a genuine human effort.
So a pearl is, quite literally, an oyster's proof of work — scarcity produced by expended effort. For a chain whose whole premise is minting value out of real computational work, it's almost too perfect a metaphor.
"Duplex" is the 2-for-1 operation at the heart of the protocol's economics — compute that mines and infers at once (Rafael Pass's paper formalizes it as "duplex work," in a regime he named "Duplexia").
Great for a whitepaper. Less great on a billboard: in American English, a duplex is mostly just a two-floor apartment — not exactly the ring you want for a world-class math breakthrough. Pearl won. But the name never fully left — it's still the internal identity on every commit.