1. Institutional Capital Bets on RWA Infrastructure
The tokenized real-world asset sector has attracted increasing attention from both traditional finance and crypto-native investors, but the infrastructure layer that would allow institutional-scale RWA activity to function reliably on public blockchains has remained underdeveloped relative to the scale of the opportunity being discussed. Pharos Network, a Layer 1 blockchain purpose-built for that infrastructure role, announced on April 8, 2026 that it has closed a $44 million Series A funding round, bringing its total capital raised to $52 million and cementing a valuation of approximately $1 billion ahead of its mainnet launch.
The round's composition reflects Pharos's positioning at the intersection of traditional and decentralized finance. Lead participants include undisclosed Asian private equity funds, publicly listed renewable energy companies, and regulated Hong Kong financial institutions. Named strategic investors include Sumitomo Corporation — the Fortune Global 500 Japanese multinational conglomerate — participating through its corporate venture subsidiary, along with crypto-native investors SNZ Holding, oracle provider Chainlink, and liquidity firm Flow Traders. The combination of blue-chip traditional finance names alongside crypto infrastructure specialists is deliberate, designed to signal that Pharos is building for institutional adoption rather than retail speculation.
2. The Founding Team: Ant Group, Microsoft Research, and Stanford
Pharos's most significant differentiator is its team's provenance. The company was founded by former leadership from Ant Group — the financial technology subsidiary of Alibaba that operates Alipay, China's dominant digital payment platform and one of the largest financial technology systems ever built. CEO and co-founder Wish Wu led teams responsible for Ant Group's blockchain infrastructure, which at its peak served as the foundation for the largest blockchain platform in Asia.
The technical team extends beyond Ant Group to include researchers from Microsoft Research and alumni of Stanford University, with specializations spanning blockchain infrastructure, formal verification — the mathematical proof-based approach to software correctness — and zero-knowledge proof systems. The team's practical track record in building financial technology at scale distinguishes Pharos from the many blockchain infrastructure projects that articulate institutional ambitions without the operational experience to substantiate them. Having built the payment rails that served hundreds of millions of transactions per day in one of the world's largest economies provides a reference point for the kind of performance requirements that genuine institutional financial infrastructure demands.
3. What Pharos Is Building: The "RealFi" Layer 1
Pharos describes its mission through the concept of "RealFi" — real finance — a framing that distinguishes its target use cases from both the speculative DeFi applications that have characterized much of public blockchain activity and the purely wholesale CBDC experiments that central banks have been conducting. The goal is to bridge over $50 trillion in real-world assets — including bonds, equities, real estate, commodities, trade receivables, and infrastructure revenue streams — with the liquidity and programmability of blockchain-based financial infrastructure.
The network is built on a deep-parallel execution architecture, designed to process multiple transaction streams simultaneously rather than sequentially, enabling the throughput levels that institutional financial applications require. The testnet has demonstrated capabilities of over 30,000 transactions per second with approximately one-second block finality. For context, existing general-purpose blockchains frequently cited as institutional infrastructure — including Ethereum — process significantly fewer transactions per second under real-world load conditions, and their settlement finality times are measured in minutes rather than seconds.
Built-in compliance modules are integrated at the protocol level rather than added as application-layer workarounds. This architectural choice reflects a deliberate orientation toward regulated institutional use cases: rather than leaving compliance as a problem for individual applications to solve independently, Pharos provides compliance tooling as a shared infrastructure primitive that applications can build on without reinventing the framework from scratch.
4. The $52 Million Funding Journey
The Series A follows a seed round of $8 million raised in November 2024, led by Lightspeed Faction and Hack VC. The progression from seed to Series A reflects a period of significant ecosystem development: the testnet launched in May 2025 under the name Atlantic Ocean, subsequent phases brought millions of users and hundreds of millions of unique addresses onto the testnet, and a strategic capital partnership with GCL New Energy — a globally significant solar and energy storage company listed in Hong Kong — established the first major pilot for energy-backed real-world assets on the network.
The GCL partnership valued Pharos at approximately $950 million in the context of GCL's equity subscription of around $24.7 million, establishing the billion-dollar valuation threshold ahead of the Series A's formal close. That valuation represents a significant premium over typical pre-mainnet Layer 1 infrastructure projects and reflects the weight assigned to the team's pedigree, the testnet's demonstrated performance metrics, and the quality of the institutional partnerships assembled before the public funding round.
5. Chainlink's Participation and What It Signals
The presence of Chainlink as a named investor in the Series A carries particular significance in the context of RWA infrastructure. Chainlink is the dominant provider of oracle services — the systems that bring real-world data onto blockchains in a format that smart contracts can consume — and has positioned itself as the primary infrastructure provider for the tokenized asset market through its Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) and its Proof of Reserve attestation product.
Chainlink's participation in Pharos's funding round is not a passive financial investment. It signals an alignment between the two companies' go-to-market strategies: Pharos provides the high-performance execution and compliance layer that institutional RWAs require, and Chainlink provides the data and interoperability infrastructure that connects those assets to real-world information sources and other blockchain networks. The RealFi Alliance that Pharos launched in February 2026 — with partners including Chainlink and Centrifuge — to standardize RWA infrastructure for institutional players formalizes this relationship into a collaborative standard-setting effort rather than a bilateral commercial arrangement.
6. The Centrifuge Partnership and Asset Distribution
Alongside Chainlink, the partnership with Centrifuge provides Pharos with a direct channel into the tokenized credit and treasury market. Centrifuge is one of the most established protocols for bringing off-chain credit assets onto public blockchains, with a track record that includes tokenized U.S. Treasuries and AAA-rated structured credit products.
The specific assets highlighted in the Pharos-Centrifuge partnership — JTRSY and JAAA — represent tokenized versions of institutional credit instruments that are typically available only through traditional brokerage and fund channels. By distributing these assets through Pharos's infrastructure, Centrifuge gains access to a high-performance, compliance-ready execution environment, while Pharos gains a credible institutional asset inventory to demonstrate the practical utility of its infrastructure beyond theoretical capability claims. For institutional investors evaluating RWA platforms, the availability of specific, recognizable asset products is more persuasive than throughput benchmarks alone.
7. Energy-Backed RWAs and the GCL Partnership
The strategic partnership with GCL New Energy — one of the world's largest solar panel manufacturers and energy storage companies — represents a category of RWA that has received less attention than financial securities but potentially addresses a much larger and more diverse market. Energy infrastructure — solar farms, wind installations, battery storage facilities — generates predictable cash flows backed by physical assets and long-term offtake agreements, making it structurally similar to the types of assets that institutional investors have historically securitized through traditional financial channels.
Tokenizing energy revenue rights on a blockchain creates the possibility of fractionalizing ownership of infrastructure assets that currently require large minimum investments, enabling a broader investor base to access returns from renewable energy deployment. For GCL, participation in the Pharos ecosystem provides a mechanism to access global capital markets through blockchain rails that may be more accessible than traditional international capital markets in certain jurisdictions, and to demonstrate the company's commitment to financial innovation alongside its core manufacturing business. The pilot program represents the first concrete deployment of energy-backed RWAs on Pharos's infrastructure — a proof-of-concept that is designed to scale if the initial results validate the model.
8. The Ecosystem Stack on Atlantic Ocean Testnet
Pharos enters its mainnet transition with a more developed application ecosystem than most pre-launch Layer 1 blockchains can demonstrate. The Atlantic Ocean Testnet has supported the development and live testing of several application-layer protocols that collectively provide a functional financial ecosystem: FaroSwap and Zenith Swap for decentralized exchange functionality, ELFi Protocol for RWA-backed lending, Fiamma for cross-chain bridging, Brokex for tokenized stock trading, and R2 for stablecoin infrastructure.
The breadth of this application stack reflects Pharos's incubation fund — a $10 million commitment to supporting projects building on the network — and demonstrates that the ecosystem-building work typically completed after mainnet launch has been substantially front-loaded. The testnet has recorded nearly three billion transactions across approximately 23 million blocks, providing genuine stress-testing data that validates the parallel execution architecture's performance claims rather than relying on theoretical benchmarks. The network has also announced a partnership with Circle to deploy USDC and Circle's Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) on mainnet, securing a major stablecoin integration that provides the liquidity foundation for the application ecosystem.
9. The Market Pharos Is Entering
The tokenized real-world asset market has been growing rapidly but from a relatively small base. Estimates for total RWA value on public blockchains as of early 2026 range from $10 billion to the low tens of billions of dollars — meaningful in absolute terms but a fraction of the $50 trillion addressable market that proponents of the category cite. Sector projections suggest total RWA outstanding could approach $60 billion in 2026 as institutional interest accelerates, with some longer-term forecasts extending to the hundreds of trillions as the technology matures and regulatory frameworks provide clarity.
The infrastructure competition for that market is intensifying. Ethereum's ecosystem, including L2 scaling solutions, has the first-mover advantage and the deepest developer community. Specialized RWA platforms including Securitize, Ondo Finance, and others have established themselves in specific asset categories. However, the institutional-grade Layer 1 specifically designed for RWA compliance and throughput requirements represents a less crowded positioning than the general-purpose smart contract platform space, and Pharos's team credentials provide a differentiated starting point for that institutional audience.
10. What the Round Means for RWA Infrastructure Investment
Pharos's $44 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation is a notable data point for the broader venture capital engagement with RWA infrastructure. Despite the bear market conditions in public token markets through Q1 2026 — with JPMorgan estimating total crypto inflows at one-third of the prior year's pace — institutional capital continues to flow into early-stage blockchain infrastructure plays at meaningful scale. The March 2026 period saw crypto startups collectively raise approximately $4.28 billion across 129 funding rounds, suggesting that the investment thesis around the next generation of blockchain infrastructure remains active even as speculative token activity contracts.
For Pharos specifically, the Series A provides the operational runway to execute the mainnet launch, scale the institutional partnership program, and demonstrate that the performance capabilities validated on testnet translate to a production environment handling real financial transactions. The gap between testnet demonstration and mainnet delivery of institutional-grade infrastructure has been a consistent stumbling block for ambitious Layer 1 projects. Whether Pharos's team — with its Alipay-scale operational experience — can navigate that transition more successfully than predecessors will determine whether the $1 billion valuation reflects genuine infrastructure value or the premium that well-credentialed pre-revenue startups command in competitive fundraising environments.