Pharos Network secures $44 million to bring institutional-grade real‑world assets onchain, pushing its EVM Layer 1 blockchain toward a valuation just shy of $1 billion and cementing its role in the rapidly expanding tokenized assets market.
The company has closed a $44 million Series A round focused on building infrastructure tailored to large financial institutions and regulated asset managers who want to move real‑world assets (RWAs) onto blockchains. This latest raise brings Pharos’ total funding to $52 million, following an $8 million seed round completed in November 2024.
Designed as an EVM‑compatible Layer 1, Pharos primarily targets the intersection of traditional finance and decentralized finance. The new capital will be directed toward extending its RWA rails across Asia and into other major financial hubs, with a public testnet scheduled to go live in May 2025. That testnet is expected to be a critical proving ground for institutional clients evaluating performance, compliance features, and integration options before committing larger volumes of assets.
The Series A follows a strategic equity deal that implicitly valued Pharos at around $950 million after GCL New Energy, a Hong Kong‑listed renewable energy firm, invested approximately $24.7 million. That transaction set the tone for the current round, signaling that established corporates in heavily regulated sectors are willing to back blockchain infrastructure that addresses real‑world capital markets rather than purely speculative use cases.
The investor lineup in the new round reflects this focus on institutional credibility. Participants include Asian private equity funds, additional renewable energy companies listed in Hong Kong, regulated financial institutions operating out of the city, and a subsidiary of Japan’s Sumitomo Corporation. They are joined by crypto‑native backers such as SNZ Holding, oracle infrastructure provider Chainlink, and trading firm Flow Traders. This mix of traditional and digital‑asset investors underlines Pharos’ ambition to sit squarely at the junction where regulated finance, DeFi, and tokenized RWAs converge.
In its technical and marketing materials, Pharos describes itself as a high‑throughput, EVM‑compatible Layer 1 blockchain built to connect traditional finance, DeFi, and real‑world assets. Its stated mission is to bridge more than $50 trillion worth of RWAs and cross‑chain capital into a modular onchain economy that can operate at “internet scale.” In practice, that means building a chain capable of handling large volumes of institutional transactions, complex compliance workflows, and integrations with existing financial systems, not just retail trading.
Over the past year, Pharos has been assembling what it calls an institutional RWA stack-a suite of tools, standards, and partnerships aimed at making tokenized assets acceptable to regulated players. That work extends beyond the latest funding. In February, Pharos launched the RealFi Alliance alongside partners including Chainlink and Centrifuge. The alliance is designed to create shared standards for how institutional RWAs are structured, reported, and maintained onchain, with the explicit goal of closing the “trust gap” around data quality, asset provenance, and onchain reporting.
A key plank of this strategy is the partnership with Centrifuge to distribute tokenized U.S. Treasuries and AAA‑rated credit products onchain. Through this collaboration, Pharos is positioning itself as a liquidity and distribution layer for instruments such as JTRSY and JAAA-tokens that represent highly rated, yield‑bearing traditional assets. By focusing on Treasuries and top‑tier credit products, Pharos aims to offer institutions familiar asset profiles in a new infrastructure wrapper, making the shift to onchain finance less risky and more intuitive.
The timing of this raise aligns with a broader acceleration in the RWA sector. Industry analyses project that outstanding tokenized real‑world assets could approach $60 billion by 2026 as banks, asset managers, and corporates increasingly test blockchain‑based issuance and settlement. At the same time, venture capital is still flowing heavily into crypto infrastructure: in March alone, digital asset startups attracted more than $4.28 billion across 129 funding rounds, despite choppy token prices and intermittent market volatility.
Within that landscape, Pharos’ near‑unicorn valuation and $52 million in total funding place it among the best‑capitalized RWA‑centric Layer 1 blockchains. The challenge now is to translate investor enthusiasm and institutional interest into tangible onchain issuance, secondary market liquidity, and repeatable use cases that demonstrate real economic value.
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Why RWAs Have Become the Next Big Crypto Narrative
Tokenized real‑world assets have moved from a niche experiment to a central theme in crypto’s evolution. The core idea is straightforward: take financial instruments that already exist-bonds, Treasuries, private credit, real estate, even revenue‑sharing agreements-and represent them as tokens on a blockchain. This unlocks several potential advantages: faster settlement, 24/7 markets, programmable cash flows, and easier global distribution.
For institutions, however, the appeal is more nuanced. They are less interested in speculative token trading and more focused on operational efficiency, compliance automation, and access to new pools of liquidity. That is where chains like Pharos attempt to differentiate themselves-from general‑purpose blockchains that cater mostly to retail users and DeFi experiments, toward purpose‑built infrastructure designed to meet regulatory and risk‑management requirements.
The RWA thesis also aligns with a broader recognition that much of the world’s value remains “offchain.” While crypto markets have created trillions in notional value during peak cycles, traditional financial assets represent hundreds of trillions in global wealth. If even a modest fraction of that capital migrates to tokenized formats-either for settlement, collateralization, or secondary trading-it could dwarf the size of purely crypto‑native markets.
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What Makes an “Institutional‑Grade” RWA Chain Different
Building an RWA‑focused Layer 1 for institutions is not just about throughput or low fees. The features that matter most to large asset managers, banks, and corporates tend to fall into a few categories:
1. Regulatory alignment and compliance tooling
Institutions need to satisfy know‑your‑customer (KYC), anti‑money‑laundering (AML), and securities law requirements. An institutional chain must support permissioned access, whitelist and blacklist controls, and integration with offchain identity verification and reporting systems.
2. Data integrity and transparency
If a token claims to represent a U.S. Treasury or a pool of AAA‑rated loans, institutions must trust the data-how it is sourced, how often it is updated, and whether it can be audited. Partnerships with oracle providers like Chainlink and standardized reporting frameworks through initiatives such as the RealFi Alliance are critical to closing that trust gap.
3. Settlement finality and risk management
Large trades cannot be subject to ambiguous settlement or frequent chain reorgs. Finality guarantees, deterministic behavior, and robust security models become non‑negotiable features, especially when positions are large and interconnected with legacy systems.
4. Integration with existing infrastructure
For institutional adoption, onchain rails must connect cleanly to offchain systems: custody solutions, portfolio management tools, risk systems, and existing trading venues. EVM compatibility is valuable here because it allows institutions to reuse developer tooling, smart contract standards, and integration patterns already proven on chains like Ethereum.
Pharos’ messaging centers on these themes, emphasizing that its chain is engineered to meet “financial‑grade” expectations rather than just delivering experimental DeFi primitives.
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Why Asia Is a Strategic Launchpad
A notable aspect of Pharos’ roadmap is its emphasis on Asia as a primary growth region. Several factors make the region strategically important for RWA adoption:
– Regulatory experimentation: Jurisdictions such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and parts of the Middle East and Asia have signaled openness to regulated digital asset frameworks, including tokenized securities and bond issuances.
– Existing appetite for yield products: Asian financial institutions and family offices have shown strong interest in structured credit, yield‑bearing products, and cross‑border capital flows-exactly the kinds of products that can be natively tokenized.
– Proximity to manufacturing and real‑economy assets: Tokenization is not limited to financial instruments; it can extend to receivables, inventory financing, and energy infrastructure. Having investors like renewable energy companies and industrial conglomerates involved gives Pharos clear pathways to real‑world asset origination.
By building relationships with Hong Kong‑listed companies and Japanese corporate groups, Pharos is effectively anchoring its ecosystem in real balance‑sheet assets, rather than relying solely on crypto‑native collateral.
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The Role of Alliances and Standards in RWA Adoption
One of the biggest hurdles to institutional RWA adoption is fragmentation: different platforms use different data models, legal structures, and reporting frameworks. That makes it hard for institutions to scale participation across multiple chains and products. Initiatives like the RealFi Alliance aim to solve this by:
– Defining common standards for how RWAs are tokenized and described.
– Establishing guidelines for disclosure, risk classification, and onchain/offchain data synchronization.
– Coordinating between oracle providers, asset issuers, and infrastructure builders to reduce inconsistencies.
For a chain like Pharos, helping to drive these standards is both a technical and strategic move. It increases confidence for large institutions that are hesitant to commit capital to environments where rules are still fluid, and it helps ensure that Pharos’ own stack becomes a reference implementation for how institutional RWA platforms should operate.
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From Tokenized Treasuries to a Full Onchain Capital Market
The early phase of institutional RWA adoption has centered heavily on tokenized U.S. Treasuries and high‑grade credit products. These assets are relatively simple to understand, enjoy deep existing markets, and serve as low‑risk collateral. Pharos’ work with Centrifuge to distribute tokens like JTRSY and JAAA is part of that broader trend.
Over time, however, the vision extends far beyond Treasuries:
– Private credit and receivables: Small and mid‑sized enterprises can access financing by tokenizing receivables or loan portfolios, while investors gain access to yield opportunities typically reserved for specialized funds.
– Infrastructure and energy assets: Backed by investors in renewable energy and industrial sectors, Pharos could support tokenization of long‑dated infrastructure projects, where cash flows are predictable but liquidity is traditionally limited.
– Structured products and tranches: Onchain logic makes it easier to create and manage tranching, waterfall payments, and risk‑segmented products, potentially broadening the investor base.
If Pharos succeeds in becoming a liquidity and distribution layer for this spectrum of assets, it could function less like a single‑purpose blockchain and more like an onchain capital market backbone.
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The Competitive Landscape for RWA Layer 1s
Pharos is not alone in targeting RWAs and institutional capital. Multiple blockchains and protocols are racing to become the default home for tokenized securities, credit, and fund shares. This competition plays out across several dimensions:
– Technology stack: Throughput, fees, finality, and security.
– Regulatory positioning: Where legal entities are domiciled, how local regulators view tokenized securities, and how compliant the stack can be made.
– Ecosystem depth: Availability of custodians, KYC providers, audit firms, legal wrappers, and DeFi protocols that can use RWAs as collateral or trading instruments.
– Distribution networks: Relationships with asset managers, banks, corporates, and market‑making firms.
Pharos’ near‑$1 billion valuation suggests investors believe it has a credible shot at capturing a significant portion of this emerging market. But it also increases the pressure to execute quickly-launching the testnet on schedule, onboarding flagship issuers, and demonstrating real volumes in primary issuance and secondary trading.
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What Success Would Look Like for Pharos Over the Next Few Years
For institutional investors and observers tracking the space, several milestones will act as proof points for Pharos’ strategy:
1. Robust public testnet and mainnet launch
Performance, uptime, and tooling quality on the testnet in May 2025 will heavily influence developer and institutional perception. A smooth transition from testnet to mainnet with clear audit trails and security assurances will be critical.
2. Flagship RWA issuances
Successful, repeat issuances of tokenized Treasuries and AAA‑rated products at meaningful scale, followed by more complex assets like private credit or infrastructure‑backed tokens.
3. Institutional integrations
Concrete integrations with custodians, asset servicers, and regulated intermediaries that enable end‑to‑end lifecycle management of tokenized assets on Pharos.
4. Secondary market depth
The presence of active market‑making by firms like Flow Traders, along with healthy onchain liquidity pools and order books, demonstrating that RWAs on Pharos are not just static representations but tradable assets.
5. Regulatory recognition
Ongoing engagement with regulators in Asia and other key jurisdictions, culminating in explicit approval or guidance that legitimizes tokenized assets issued on chains like Pharos for use by banks and funds.
If these elements come together, Pharos could transition from a well‑funded infrastructure bet into a core component of the emerging onchain financial system.
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The Bigger Picture: From Crypto Speculation to Real Capital Markets
The broader significance of Pharos’ raise lies in what it signals about crypto’s next phase. After cycles dominated by speculative tokens, meme assets, and experimental DeFi, more capital is flowing into infrastructure that connects blockchains to real economic activity. Tokenized RWAs are central to this shift, providing a path for traditional capital markets to gradually adopt blockchain rails without abandoning familiar asset classes.
Pharos Network, with its $44 million Series A, institutional backers, and focus on high‑grade tokenized products, is positioning itself at the forefront of that transformation. Whether it ultimately becomes a dominant RWA Layer 1 or one of several specialized chains, its trajectory reflects how the conversation in digital assets is moving from “What can we trade?” to “How do we rebuild the financial system itself on programmable, interoperable, and globally accessible rails?”