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Pharos Network: How Ant Group Veterans Are Building the 'GPU of Blockchains' for a $10 Trillion RWA Market

· 8 min read
Dora Noda
Dora Noda
Software Engineer

When the former CTO of Ant Chain and the Chief Security Officer of Ant Financial's Web3 division left one of the world's largest fintech companies to start a blockchain from scratch, the industry took notice. Their bet? That the $24 billion tokenized real-world asset market is about to explode into the trillions—and existing blockchains aren't ready for it.

Pharos Network, the high-performance Layer 1 they're building, just closed an $8 million seed round led by Lightspeed Faction and Hack VC. But the more interesting number is the $1.5 billion RWA pipeline they've announced with Ant Digital Technologies, their former employer's Web3 arm. This isn't a speculative DeFi play—it's an institutional-grade infrastructure bet backed by people who've already built financial systems processing billions of transactions.

The Ant Group DNA: Building for Scale They've Already Seen​

Alex Zhang, Pharos's CEO, spent years as CTO of Ant Chain, overseeing blockchain infrastructure that processed transactions for hundreds of millions of users across Alibaba's ecosystem. Co-founder and CTO Meng Wu was responsible for security at Ant Financial's Web3 division, protecting some of the most valuable financial infrastructure in Asia.

Their diagnosis of the current blockchain landscape is blunt: existing networks weren't designed for the financial industry's actual requirements. Solana optimizes for speed but lacks the compliance primitives institutions need. Ethereum prioritizes decentralization but can't deliver the sub-second finality that real-time payments demand. The "institutional Solana" doesn't exist yet.

Pharos aims to fill that gap with what they call a "full-stack parallel blockchain"—a network designed from the ground up for the specific demands of tokenized assets, cross-border payments, and enterprise DeFi.

The Technical Architecture: Beyond Sequential Processing​

Most blockchains process transactions sequentially, like a single-file line at a bank. Even Ethereum's recent upgrades and Solana's parallel processing treat the blockchain as a unified system with fundamental throughput limits. Pharos takes a different approach, implementing what they call "Degree of Parallelism" optimization—essentially treating the blockchain like a GPU rather than a CPU.

The Three-Layer Design:

  • L1-Base: Provides data availability with hardware acceleration, handling the raw storage and retrieval of blockchain data at speeds traditional networks can't match.

  • L1-Core: Implements a novel BFT consensus that allows multiple validator nodes to propose, validate, and commit transactions concurrently. Unlike classical BFT implementations requiring fixed leader roles and round-based communication, Pharos validators operate in parallel.

  • L1-Extension: Enables "Special Processing Networks" (SPNs)—customized execution environments for specific use cases like high-frequency trading or AI model execution. Think of it as creating dedicated fast lanes for different types of financial activity.

The Execution Engine:

The heart of Pharos is its parallel execution system combining LLVM-based intermediate representation conversion with speculative parallel processing. The technical innovations include:

  • Smart Access List Inference (SALI): Static and dynamic analysis to identify which state entries a contract will access, enabling transactions with non-overlapping state to execute simultaneously.

  • Dual VM Support: Both EVM and WASM virtual machines, ensuring Solidity compatibility while enabling high-performance execution for contracts written in Rust or other languages.

  • Pipelined Block Processing: Inspired by superscalar processors, dividing the block lifecycle into parallel stages—consensus ordering, database preloading, execution, Merkleization, and flushing all happen concurrently.

The result? Their testnet has demonstrated 30,000+ TPS with 0.5-second block times, with mainnet targets of 50,000 TPS and sub-second finality. For context, Visa processes roughly 1,700 TPS on average.

Why RWA Tokenization Needs Different Infrastructure​

The tokenized real-world asset market has grown from $85 million in 2020 to over $24 billion by mid-2025—a 245x increase in just five years. McKinsey projects $2 trillion by 2030; Standard Chartered estimates $30 trillion by 2034. Some analysts expect $50 trillion in annual RWA trading by decade's end.

But here's the disconnect: most of this growth has happened on chains that weren't designed for it. Private credit dominates the current market at $17 billion, followed by U.S. Treasuries at $7.3 billion. These aren't speculative tokens—they're regulated financial instruments requiring:

  • Identity verification that satisfies KYC/AML requirements across jurisdictions
  • Compliance primitives built into the protocol layer, not bolted on afterward
  • Sub-second settlement for real-time payment applications
  • Institutional-grade security with formal verification and hardware-backed protection

Pharos addresses these requirements with native zkDID authentication and on-chain/off-chain credit systems. When they talk about "bridging TradFi and Web3," they mean building the compliance rails into the infrastructure itself.

The Ant Digital Partnership: $1.5 Billion in Real Assets​

The strategic partnership with ZAN—Ant Digital Technologies' Web3 brand—isn't just a press release. It represents a $1.5 billion pipeline of renewable energy RWA assets slated for the Pharos mainnet at launch.

The collaboration focuses on three areas:

  1. Node services and infrastructure: ZAN's enterprise-grade node operations supporting Pharos's validator network
  2. Security and hardware acceleration: Leveraging Ant's experience with hardware-secured financial systems
  3. RWA use case development: Bringing actual tokenized assets—not hypothetical ones—to the network from day one

The Pharos team has prior experience implementing tokenization projects including Xiexin Energy Technology and Langxin Group. They're not learning RWA tokenization on Pharos—they're applying expertise developed inside one of the world's largest fintech ecosystems.

From Testnet to Mainnet: The Q1 2026 Launch​

Pharos launched its AtlanticOcean testnet with impressive metrics: nearly 3 billion transactions across 23 million blocks since May, all with 0.5-second block times. The testnet introduced:

  • Hybrid parallel execution based on DAG and Block-STM V1
  • Official PoS tokenomics with a 1 billion token supply
  • Modular architecture decoupling consensus, execution, and storage layers
  • Integration with major wallets including OKX Wallet and Bitget Wallet

Mainnet is scheduled for Q1 2026, coinciding with the Token Generation Event. The foundation charter will be released after TGE, establishing the governance framework for what aims to be a truly decentralized network despite its institutional focus.

The project has attracted over 1.4 million testnet users—a significant community for a pre-mainnet network, suggesting strong interest in the RWA-focused narrative.

The Competitive Landscape: Where Does Pharos Fit?​

The RWA tokenization space is getting crowded. Provenance leads with over $12 billion in assets. Ethereum hosts major issuers like BlackRock and Ondo. Canton Network—backed by Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas, and DTCC—processes over $4 trillion in tokenized transactions monthly.

Pharos's positioning is distinct:

  • Versus Canton: Canton is permissioned; Pharos aims for trustless decentralization with compliance primitives
  • Versus Ethereum: Pharos offers 50x the throughput with native RWA infrastructure
  • Versus Solana: Pharos prioritizes institutional compliance over raw DeFi throughput
  • Versus Plume Network: Both target RWA, but Pharos brings Ant Group's enterprise DNA and existing asset pipeline

The Ant Group pedigree matters here. Building financial infrastructure isn't just about technical architecture—it's about understanding regulatory requirements, institutional risk management, and the actual workflows of financial services. The Pharos team has built these systems at scale.

What This Means for the RWA Narrative​

The RWA tokenization thesis is straightforward: most of the world's value exists in illiquid assets that could benefit from blockchain's settlement efficiency, programmability, and global accessibility. Real estate, private credit, commodities, infrastructure—these markets dwarf cryptocurrency's entire market cap.

But the infrastructure gap has been real. Tokenizing a Treasury bill on Ethereum works; tokenizing $300 million in renewable energy assets requires compliance rails, institutional-grade security, and throughput that doesn't collapse under real-world transaction volumes.

Pharos represents a new category of blockchain: not a general-purpose smart contract platform optimizing for DeFi composability, but a specialized financial infrastructure layer designed for the specific requirements of tokenized real-world assets.

Whether they succeed depends on execution—literally. Can they deliver 50,000 TPS at mainnet? Will institutions actually deploy assets on the network? Does the compliance framework satisfy regulators across jurisdictions?

The answers will emerge through 2026. But with $8 million in funding, $1.5 billion in announced asset pipeline, and a team that's already built financial systems at Ant Group scale, Pharos has the resources and credibility to find out.

BlockEden.xyz provides enterprise-grade blockchain infrastructure for the next generation of Web3 applications. As RWA tokenization transforms global finance, reliable node services and API access become critical infrastructure. Explore our API marketplace to build on foundations designed for institutional-grade applications.

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