Late-night breaking news: Former Ant Group team members have been gone for 20 months, building a RWA public chain! The mainnet launched with 4.3 billion transactions, institutions are frantically snatching up 50 million in pre-staking, are you on board for this trillion-dollar migration?

No empty talk, just get to the point.

The story today features two people—Wish Wu and Alex Zhang. They left Ant Group and spent 20 months building a public chain from scratch called Pharos. It just went live on its mainnet on April 28, codenamed Pacific Ocean.

You might be familiar with Ant Group—that’s the company behind Alipay. Wish and Alex used to work in Ant’s Web3 division ZAN, dealing daily with banks, asset management firms, and cross-border payment platforms. These institutional clients repeatedly voiced the same pain point: it’s not that they don’t accept blockchain, but they can’t find a public chain that is both compliant and capable of sharing liquidity. Consortium chains are too closed, public chains are too transparent—neither side is comfortable.

In September 2024, the two decided to leave and start their own venture. At the time, many thought they were crazy—the public chain space was already fiercely competitive, how could a newcomer survive?

The answer lies in the data.

First, let’s look at the broader market context. After the U.S. GENIUS Act passed in July 2025, institutional capital flooded into RWA tokenization. According to RWA.xyz data: the total on-chain tokenized asset market cap skyrocketed from about $8.8 billion in April 2025 to nearly $30 billion in April 2026, with an annual growth rate over 240%. BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, Circle’s USYC, Franklin Templeton’s on-chain money market funds—these names, once only seen in traditional finance, are now all on the chain.

But behind the glamour, there’s a structural dilemma: permissionless public chains like Ethereum and Solana are fully transparent, which institutions can’t accept (as they can’t expose their business secrets); permissioned consortium chains like Hyperledger Fabric and R3 Corda can control permissions but sacrifice open liquidity and DeFi composability.

Pharos offers an answer with a framework called SPN (Special Processing Networks). Simply put, it allows different business scenarios—such as compliant stablecoins, institutional lending, energy RWA, cross-border payments—to run in their own isolated execution environments while sharing the security and liquidity of the mainnet. Each SPN can configure its own virtual machine, node access policies, compliance parameters, and fee settlement logic. This preserves the openness of a public chain while providing a customizable sandbox for institutions across different jurisdictions.

Having the architecture isn’t enough; compliance and privacy must also be addressed. Pharos has built-in zk-AML and KYC modules, using zero-knowledge proofs to achieve “verifiable compliance identities and transaction behaviors”: transparent to regulators, private to the market. This isn’t just theoretical—it’s a hard translation of Ant Group’s accumulated compliance experience during the alliance chain era into native public chain capabilities.

On performance, they developed Pipelined BFT consensus, reducing transaction finality to under one second. They also built a deep parallel architecture with a DP (degree of parallelism) framework, ranging from DP0 to DP5. Ethereum is at DP0 at the bottom, while Pharos aims for DP5 at the top. In practice, the public testnet processed nearly 4.3 billion transactions in less than a year, covering over 200 million wallets, with monthly on-chain active users stable at 2 to 3 million, and block times at 0.5 seconds.

In terms of funding, in November 2024, they raised $8 million in seed funding led by Lightspeed Faction and Hack VC. On April 8, 2026, they closed a Series A round of $44 million, jointly led by traditional tech, finance, and crypto institutions. Notably, strategic capital from GCL New Energy, a Hong Kong-listed energy company, pushed Pharos’s valuation close to $1 billion. The investor list also includes Sumitomo Corporation, Flow Traders, and other traditional financial and industrial capital. Wish Wu said, “Investors and us have a true ‘supportive’ relationship—they don’t just exit at launch.”

For ecosystem development, even before the mainnet launched, they formed the RealFi Alliance, bringing in key industry players like Chainlink, Centrifuge, LayerZero, Asseto Finance, Ember, and later Dune, Four Pillars, Anchorage Digital, and Alchemy as strategic partners. On launch day, over 50 DApps were deployed simultaneously. The most impressive was a $50 million RWA treasury pre-pledge, quickly oversubscribed within days, with a $10 million public round filled in just one hour. On the first day of mainnet, real high-quality assets and liquidity were already on-chain—not an empty shell.

The tokenomics are also interesting. PROS has a total supply of 1 billion tokens, with core team and private investors locked for 12 months plus 36 months linear vesting. During the first six months before launch, staking inflation was 0%; only from the seventh month did they introduce an annualized 5% staking incentive. This “initial deflation buffer followed by inflation incentives” approach is almost counter to industry norms. Most projects launch with high inflation yields to attract stakers, but Pharos sacrifices short-term attention for a healthier environment for value discovery.

Looking at the competitive landscape, Canton Network has accumulated over $340 billion in off-chain assets linked through partnerships with Goldman Sachs, Deloitte, and BNY Mellon; Ethereum has BlackRock’s BUIDL and Societe Generale’s tokenized bonds; Avalanche and XRP Ledger are also vying for market share. Pharos’s differentiation is clear: focusing on Asia-Pacific as the core, radiating globally. The region offers unique asset supply—large-scale renewable energy, complex supply chain finance, active cross-border trade—as well as licensing frameworks like Hong Kong’s licensing regime, Singapore’s Project Guardian, and Dubai’s regulatory system. The energy assets from GCL New Energy, brought on-chain by GCL, are difficult for Western competitors to replicate in the short term.

Of course, the road ahead isn’t smooth. The mainnet just launched, and it needs to prove its reliability and security in actual operation; awareness outside Asia-Pacific still needs to be built. Competition in public chains is a long-term endurance race.

Finally, a data point: the RWA tokenization sector currently has about $30 billion in on-chain assets, a tiny fraction compared to hundreds of trillions in traditional finance. BlackRock’s Larry Fink predicts that by the 2030s, tokenized assets could reach hundreds of trillions of dollars; Standard Chartered estimates $30 trillion. Even if only half materializes, it’s enough to support dozens of public chains at Pharos’s level.

Today’s RWA sector is a lot like AI three or four years ago—industry insiders see the endless potential, but many onlookers hesitate.

At its core, Pharos’s story is a vote on industry values: proving that slow development, long-term locking, and an institution-oriented public chain model can still work in today’s impatient crypto market.

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