The Layer-1 blockchain, built by former Ant Group engineers and backed by Sumitomo Corporation and Chainlink, is betting that tokenised real-world assets need purpose-built rails rather than retrofitted smart contract platforms.
Pharos Network has closed a $44 million Series A round that values the Layer-1 blockchain at approximately $950 million, bringing total funding to $52 million as the company accelerates its push to become the default infrastructure layer for tokenised real-world assets across Asia.
The round drew a mix of traditional and crypto-native capital that is notable for its geographic and institutional breadth. Sumitomo Corporation — the Japanese conglomerate with $48 billion in annual revenue — participated alongside Chainlink, Flow Traders, and a consortium of Asia-based private equity funds and regulated Hong Kong financial institutions. The Series A follows an $8 million seed round in November 2024 led by Lightspeed Faction and Hack VC.
Pharos was built by engineers from Ant Group, the fintech arm of Alibaba, and the pedigree shows in the architecture. The chain uses a modular design with what the team calls deep-parallel execution — a throughput-oriented approach designed to handle the high-frequency, high-value transaction patterns that characterise institutional finance rather than the consumer-facing workloads most Layer-1s optimise for. Built-in compliance features are positioned as a selling point rather than an afterthought, which distinguishes Pharos from chains that bolt regulatory tooling onto general-purpose platforms.
The billion-dollar valuation, however, requires context. A significant portion of Pharos's valuation trajectory was set by a strategic investment from GCL New Energy, the Hong Kong-listed renewable energy company, which completed a $24.73 million investment at the ~$950 million valuation in March after initial disclosure in January. GCL is not a typical crypto investor — the partnership is specifically focused on tokenising renewable energy assets, building decentralised energy trading systems, and tracking carbon footprints on-chain.
Wish Wu, Pharos co-founder and CEO, described the GCL partnership as a proof point for the chain's thesis. 'This collaboration brings together Web3 infrastructure and a global energy leader to explore how blockchain technology can be integrated into real-world industries,' he said. The framing is deliberately conservative — 'explore' and 'integrate' rather than 'disrupt' and 'revolutionise' — which suggests a team that understands institutional sales cycles require patience rather than hype.
The real-world asset sector has grown substantially; tokenised assets surpassed $27 billion on-chain according to recent IMF data, though the fund cautioned that the growth could amplify market crises if risk management does not keep pace. Pharos is entering a market where the opportunity is large but the competition is intensifying — Circle's Arc blockchain targets institutional stablecoin settlement, Ethereum's Layer-2 ecosystem is courting traditional finance aggressively, and established players like JPMorgan's Onyx platform already handle billions in daily transactions.
What sets Pharos apart, at least on paper, is its geographic focus. Asia's capital markets — particularly Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan — have moved faster than the United States or Europe on regulatory frameworks for tokenised securities. Hong Kong's Securities and Futures Commission has granted licences for tokenised fund distribution; Singapore's MAS has been running Project Guardian with major banks; Japan's FSA is overhauling its crypto framework with provisions that could facilitate tokenised asset trading.
Pharos is currently live on its Atlantic Ocean testnet, with mainnet expected later this year. The company has reported millions of users and hundreds of millions of unique addresses on the testnet, though those figures — common in crypto where airdrop farming inflates activity metrics — should be treated with appropriate scepticism until mainnet launch provides real usage data.
The $44 million will fund engineering expansion, compliance infrastructure, and what the company calls 'ecosystem onboarding' — a polite way of saying it needs to convince asset managers, energy companies, and financial institutions to build on Pharos rather than the dozen other chains competing for the same clients. The Sumitomo and GCL partnerships suggest that process has begun, but turning strategic investments into production-scale transaction volume is the gap where most enterprise blockchain projects quietly expire.
