Pharos Network, a financial-grade Layer 1 blockchain specifically engineered for institutional-scale real-world assets (RWAs), has successfully closed a $44 million Series A funding round. This milestone brings the company’s total valuation to a significant level, with $52 million in total funding to date, building upon an initial $8 million seed round led by Lightspeed Faction and Hack VC in late 2024.
The latest round was co-led by a powerhouse consortium comprising premier Asian private equity funds, publicly traded renewable energy giants, and regulated financial institutions based in Hong Kong. Strategic investors in this round included Sumitomo Corporation’s venture arm, Chainlink, SNZ, and Flow Traders.
Scaling the “RealFi” Vision
Pharos Network is positioning itself as the foundational layer for RealFi—a term used to describe the convergence of decentralized finance (DeFi) and traditional finance (TradFi). The network is designed to bridge an estimated $50 trillion market of real-world assets, including credit, real estate, and energy, into a modular on-chain economy.
“This funding allows us to scale RealFi from narrative to execution,” said Wish Wu, Co-Founder and CEO of Pharos Network. Wu, a veteran of Ant Group (Alipay), emphasized that the network is purpose-built for institutional reliability, featuring a deep-parallel execution architecture that allows for high transaction throughput and built-in compliance modules.
Key Strategic Expansions and Partnerships
The funding comes amid a period of rapid growth for the Pharos ecosystem:
- Energy-Backed RWAs: Pharos recently partnered with global solar leader GCL to pilot energy-backed assets, leveraging blockchain to provide transparency and liquidity to the renewable energy sector.
- The RealFi Alliance: Earlier this year, Pharos launched the RealFi Alliance, a strategic initiative involving partners like Centrifuge and Circle to standardize RWA infrastructure and ensure cross-chain interoperability.
- Stablecoin Integration: The network has integrated Circle’s USDC and CCTP (Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol), providing a compliant, institutional-grade stablecoin for settlement on the upcoming mainnet.
Technological Edge: Compliance at the Core
Unlike many general-purpose blockchains, Pharos is “asset-native.” Its architecture supports both EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) and WASM (WebAssembly) environments, making it highly accessible to both crypto-native developers and traditional enterprise engineers. Crucially, it incorporates identity and regulatory compliance features directly into the protocol level, allowing institutions to manage risk governance without sacrificing the efficiency of on-chain transactions.
What’s Next for Pharos?
The $44 million infusion will be used to accelerate the build-out of RWA infrastructure across Asia and global markets. Currently, Pharos is live on its Atlantic Ocean Testnet, which has already seen millions of independent addresses and high user engagement.
As the industry moves closer to a “mainnet-ready” state, Pharos is emerging as a top contender to become the global settlement layer for the next generation of digital finance, transforming how institutional capital and real-world value circulate on-chain.
