Crypto's First Reverse Holding of Hong Kong Stocks: The New Capital Model Experiment Behind Pharos's 1 Billion Valuation

Author: Deep Tide TechFlow

The long-sluggish Crypto market has welcomed another billion-dollar valuation project, but this time the main highlight isn’t the valuation itself.

On March 14, 2026, the institution-grade high-performance parallel Layer 1 public chain Pharos, built for real finance, announced a comprehensive upgrade of its capital partnership with GCL New Energy Holdings (0451.HK), a listed company on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, quickly becoming a market focus.

The market was first attracted by the valuation: according to the latest agreement signed by both parties, GCL New Energy will invest in Pharos at nearly a $1 billion valuation. This number alone is enough to ignite community discussion.

But then, people discovered something more interesting than the valuation:

According to disclosed documents, this investment subscription is not a simple “sign and it’s effective” one-time investment, but includes multiple preconditions and phased delivery terms. If any key condition is unmet, the cooperation could instantly become worthless.

In simple terms, signing the partnership ≠ actual funds received; everything depends on the market performance of Pharos Token upon listing.

All these make this investment feel less like traditional crypto and more like a capital game with a clear betting element, played between traditional markets and crypto: both aim for win-win cooperation, backed by preconditions.

When crypto financing, accustomed to “unconditional funding,” begins to be pulled into the traditional capital arena, what should we expect from the subsequent market?

New Ways of Crypto Financing: Token-Stock Binding, Phased Unlocking

Many compare this investment subscription to a crypto version of “betting,” because it captures the risk control logic inherent in betting mechanisms.

In traditional capital markets, betting is a favorite risk control tool: investors offer high valuations, entrepreneurs make commitments. If future KPIs are met, everyone is happy; if not, founders may need to buy back shares out of pocket.

Traditional investment banks often focus on future revenue and profit, while crypto emphasizes a very Web3-specific metric: token listing performance.

But if you only focus on the betting concept, you might overlook the innovative model behind this transaction.

How can traditional equity, representing traditional capital, better integrate with crypto tokens? Pharos and GCL New Energy have taken the lead with a novel model: a sophisticated, mutual investment structure with synchronized effectiveness and phased unlocking—an isomorphic binding of new capital.

The first step of this structural innovation is Pharos’s pre-commitment to GCL New Energy shares.

Pharos acts as a pre-investor, subscribing to new GCL shares at HKD 1.05 per share, with a maximum subscription of 183,480,000 shares (about 10% of GCL New Energy). Compared to GCL’s current share price of around HKD 1.23, this subscription offers Pharos approximately a 15% discount.

But on the capital table, there are no free lunches.

To truly secure these discounted shares, Pharos must meet GCL New Energy’s “five-step” delivery conditions within 18 months, with each step closely tied to the future market performance of Pharos Token.

Once Pharos Token meets the delivery conditions, the subscription of GCL shares by Pharos becomes effective, and the subscription of Pharos Token by GCL New Energy also becomes effective, with matching unlock ratios.

Under this dual-binding:

• If Pharos Token performs well, both shares and tokens are delivered together;
• If Pharos Token underperforms, both are paused together.

Taking the most critical first batch as an example: after Pharos Token successfully lists and opens above the listing price, Pharos will immediately deliver 50% of the GCL shares, while GCL will acquire approximately HKD 96.73 million worth of Pharos Tokens at a valuation of USD 950 million.

With this type of subscription agreement, plus Pharos’s prior announcement that Anchorage Digital will provide regulated minting, distribution, and custody services for Pharos TGE, Pharos is now approaching the countdown to TGE.

Mutual Benefits: One Agreement, Two Wins

This special investment transaction occurs at a delicate moment.

Past experience has shown that the old financing logic—crypto projects telling stories via whitepapers and supporting valuations with liquidity—has become ineffective. The market has seen too many bubbles and collapses. What we need now is a vivid demonstration combining real assets, compliance frameworks, and on-chain imagination.

Pharos and GCL New Energy’s deal is precisely such a demonstration.

Behind the complex terms are mutual interests: both sides try to lock in what they care about most through contractual arrangements:

For GCL New Energy, this is an excellent model that is both offensive and defensive.

Investing in Pharos is a proactive bet on on-chain narratives, while the betting structure effectively manages risk: if Pharos underperforms, GCL can withdraw in time; if Pharos excels, GCL not only gains real capital injection but also acquires tokens with high appreciation potential at the initial valuation.

For Pharos, the value of this deal goes far beyond adding a partner.

First, it’s a trust endorsement. A Hong Kong-listed company willing to tie its shares and tokens together is a significant public recognition of Pharos.

Second, it’s a confidence signal. Pharos’s acceptance of these strict delivery terms strongly conveys the project’s confidence in future development—more persuasive than any whitepaper.

Third, it’s a historic “industry first.” Over the past year, many traditional listed companies have bought into crypto assets via DAT models. Now, the direction is reversing: Pharos directly enters GCL New Energy’s shareholder ranks through this subscription, becoming the first crypto project to strategically hold shares in a traditional Hong Kong-listed company.

This largely signifies that high-quality crypto projects in the crypto world are finally gaining real negotiation power and pricing influence in traditional capital markets. The transaction is also supported by the Hong Kong Stock Exchange announcement, demonstrating Hong Kong’s forward-looking stance on embracing compliant crypto innovation, adding a strong compliance foundation to this deal.

One contract, two ways to win.

In a scenario aiming for mutual benefit and avoiding mutual loss, many are curious about the two main protagonists leading this innovative model.

Why would a conservative Hong Kong-listed company dare to include future price performance in a contract? And why would GCL New Energy risk tying its shares to an unproven token?

A closer look reveals that this seemingly bold cross-sector alliance is driven by mutual necessity.

Mirror Complementarity: The Inevitable Meeting of Pharos and GCL

In this innovative model, one side of the table is GCL New Energy.

As Asia’s leading photovoltaic company, its core business focuses on the development, construction, operation, and management of solar power plants, along with power sales and solar-related services. Despite holding top-tier green assets, it faces common challenges: long construction cycles, slow returns, and increasingly fierce competition for financing.

What GCL needs most is not more power plants but a financial tool capable of reorganizing, circulating, and revaluing these off-chain assets.

On the other side is Pharos.

As a parallel Layer 1 targeting institutional scenarios, Pharos was clear from inception: it’s not about building a higher-performance public chain, but about supporting real-world assets—stablecoins, institutional DeFi, regulation-friendly payment networks, and especially RWA such as energy, commodities, and infrastructure assets. In short, Pharos aims to be a foundational infrastructure capable of supporting real financial narratives.

Performance is the prerequisite for realizing the “RealFi infrastructure” vision. Built on modular design and a deep parallel execution engine, Pharos offers sub-second confirmation, high throughput, and low fees, better supporting asset on-chain, circulation, and real-time settlement.

Regarding compliance—an area of great concern for institutional on-chain assets—Pharos protocol layer integrates ZK-KYC/AML, digital identity, supports regulatory friendliness, and remains open.

Before collaborating with GCL New Energy, Pharos had already gained favor from capital and institutions:

According to public data, Pharos completed two funding rounds in November 2024 and September 2025, supported by well-known VCs like Hack VC and Lightspeed Faction.

In institutional cooperation, Pharos announced a partnership with decentralized finance platform Centrifuge, combining Centrifuge’s institutional tokenization infrastructure and asset standards with Pharos’s “inclusive and execution-first” Layer 1, further enabling the tokenization and on-chain distribution of assets like US Treasuries (JTRSY) and AAA-rated structured credit products (JAAA).

Putting these two players together reveals an almost mirror-like complementarity between GCL New Energy and Pharos.

For GCL, it seeks a crypto vehicle capable of unlocking Web3, RWA, and market revaluation space—transforming offline heavy assets into new on-chain capital forms.

For Pharos, it needs a traditional capital gateway that can support high valuations, compliance narratives, and real asset imaginations—bringing on-chain stories into real-world assets.

From this perspective, this investment isn’t just a partnership; it’s an inevitable convergence. Interestingly, Ant Group, which has intersected with both sides, is often called the invisible bridge in this convergence.

As early as December 2024, GCL Energy Technology partnered with Ant Group’s Ant Chain to complete China’s first RWA deal involving over 200 million yuan in photovoltaic green assets. By June 2025, they established a joint venture “Ant Xin Neng” to further explore energy AI + RWA scenarios.

We also know that Pharos co-founders and several team members come from Ant Group, and Ant Chain has extensive enterprise blockchain experience. This likely enhances Pharos’s technical capabilities and institutional resource integration when addressing institutional RWA needs, indirectly setting the stage for this collaboration.

But if you only see this as a capital tie-up, you underestimate its potential. Once the partnership is signed, the bigger story lies in future cooperation structures, on-chain asset pathways, and more innovative collaborations.

Based on Pharos’s disclosed on-chain locked assets, currently:

• 51% are from distributed photovoltaic operators and centralized power plant operators’ renewable assets;
• 49% are from fund management companies and credit asset issuers’ financial assets.

This strongly indicates that assets like GCL’s photovoltaic and renewable power plants will soon be on-chain.

This means that high-quality Asian green energy assets, represented by GCL New Energy, will be able to connect more efficiently with global markets beyond regional limits. Meanwhile, Pharos aims to bring high-quality RWA assets from Europe and America into Asia, enhancing Asian investors’ global asset allocation.

Whether outward or inward, this binding model based on equity, tokens, and assets could unleash growth far beyond the subscription itself.

Conclusion

Of course, everything is still in very early stages.

In today’s highly uncertain future, concerns and doubts are perfectly normal.

Some community members believe that, based on disclosed documents, Pharos’s nearly $1 billion valuation is derived from a total locked asset value of $250 million, disclosed unilaterally by the project, lacking genuine market endorsement.

Others worry that the phased delivery model might put excessive pressure on the secondary market for Pharos Tokens. With mainnet not yet launched and tokens not yet issued, this can be seen as a confidence bet, but it’s uncertain whether it might become an early depletion of confidence in the future.

But these differing voices highlight the community’s ongoing concern about the project’s future development. They do not prevent us from seeing the innovative model behind this token-stock collaboration:

In the past, crypto financing was more about telling a good story first to raise funds, then proving oneself with that money.

Now, the cooperation between Pharos and GCL New Energy sends a strong signal: the next wave of crypto may be about who dares to embed stories into contracts, entrust narratives to the market, and turn promises into enforceable realities.

In an era of bubbles, imagination is the most expensive; in an era of revaluation, execution power is the most valuable.

And perhaps, this is the true value left to the industry by this investment subscription.