Pharos Network, an EVM-compatible Layer 1 targeting real-world asset (RWA) settlement, closed a $44 million Series A on April 8, 2026, bringing total funding to $52 million since its November 2024 seed. The round lifted the network's pre-mainnet valuation to approximately $1 billion, a figure anc...
"The Pharos Testnet represents a significant milestone in our mission to unlock the true potential of RWAs. By providing a high-performance, scalable, and adaptable platform, Pharos meet the needs of bringing real world assets on a chain and bringing utilities to these assets." — Alex Zhang, CEO of Pharos Network, former CTO of Ant Group's blockchain business
Pharos Network, an EVM-compatible Layer 1 targeting real-world asset (RWA) settlement, closed a $44 million Series A on April 8, 2026, bringing total funding to $52 million since its November 2024 seed. The round lifted the network's pre-mainnet valuation to approximately $1 billion, a figure anchored by a strategic equity investment from GCL New Energy (HKEX: 0451), the Hong Kong-listed affiliate of Chinese solar manufacturer GCL-Poly. Strategic investors include Sumitomo Corporation via a subsidiary, and crypto-native firms SNZ and Flow Traders.
The round lands in a crowded field. Onchain tokenized RWAs sit between $12 billion and $21 billion depending on the measurement methodology, with tokenized U.S. Treasuries accounting for roughly $5.8 billion of that base. BlackRock's BUIDL fund alone represents $1.9–2.3 billion, Franklin Templeton and Ondo Finance together manage several billion more. Against these incumbents, Pharos is a pre-mainnet L1 whose primary differentiation is a claimed 30,000 transactions per second on testnet, a founding team drawn from Ant Group's blockchain unit, and a tied-in industrial anchor — GCL — that plans to tokenize energy assets on the network.
Mainnet and token generation are scheduled for Q2 2026. The economic question for Pharos is whether a new L1 can capture RWA flows that are already settling on Ethereum, Base, Avalanche, and permissioned networks operated by custodians — or whether its path to revenue depends entirely on GCL's captive energy-asset pipeline and a handful of Asia-centric institutional deals.
Pharos announced the $44 million Series A on April 8, 2026, via press releases carried by CoinDesk, Benzinga, and Chainwire. The raise brings cumulative funding to $52 million after an $8 million seed round completed in November 2024. No token allocation, lockup schedule, or valuation discount has been publicly disclosed for the Series A component.
The round was led by a consortium described by the company as "premier Asia-based private equity funds, publicly traded renewable energy giants, and regulated Hong Kong financial institutions." Named strategic investors include:
The GCL component is the most consequential. It was not originated in the Series A; GCL New Energy first disclosed its intent to invest on January 8, 2026, and finalized the transaction on March 13, 2026, at a valuation "nearly $1 billion." Because GCL New Energy is HKEX-listed, the investment went through mandatory regulatory disclosure procedures — a detail that Pharos has consistently highlighted in its marketing. According to reporting from ChainCatcher and PANews, the deal is structured as a subscription with performance-linked terms, described in Chinese-language coverage as a "betting" investment, which typically implies milestone-based equity adjustments tied to execution targets.
A separate report from Bitcoin World references a 10.71% stake held by the Pharos Foundation in GCL New Energy, suggesting the capital flow is bidirectional and that the two entities are commercially linked beyond a single cap-table event. That cross-shareholding structure is unusual for a pre-mainnet L1.
GCL New Energy is the blockchain and "power-compute integration" vehicle of GCL Group. GCL-Poly Energy and its affiliates are among the largest polysilicon producers globally. GCL New Energy's mandate, per its HKEX filings and the Pharos announcement, covers tokenization of renewable-energy revenue streams, decentralized energy trading, and on-chain carbon accounting.
The three stated joint use cases with Pharos are:
None of these use cases have been quantified publicly. GCL has not disclosed the notional value of energy assets it plans to tokenize on Pharos, the fee structure, or a delivery timeline. The absence of hard numbers makes it difficult to model whether GCL's pipeline alone can sustain transaction flow on a network that needs validator economics to work post-mainnet.
What GCL does provide is industrial legitimacy and regulatory cover. A HKEX-listed issuer choosing to invest in an unlaunched L1 is a signal that Pharos has cleared whatever internal compliance review GCL ran — not a guarantee of technical or commercial success, but a reduction in counterparty risk for downstream partners.
Pharos launched its Atlantic Ocean Testnet in May 2025. According to the company's May 2025 press release and subsequent Messari coverage, the testnet claims:
These numbers are testnet figures reported by the issuer and have not been independently benchmarked by a third party such as Blockworks Research or L2Beat. Throughput claims in the 30,000–50,000 TPS range are common across new L1s and frequently fail to translate to mainnet conditions under realistic MEV, state-growth, and decentralization constraints. Solana, which is operational and battle-tested, reports 4,000–8,000 non-vote TPS in production depending on the measurement window.
Pharos also announced a collaboration with Morpho to deploy a native lending layer for RWAs. The integration is announced but not yet live, and its parameters — LTV, liquidation mechanics, oracle feeds, permissioned collateral — have not been published.
The RWA tokenization category has a clear incumbent structure by product, not by chain. The largest flows live on Ethereum mainnet and a small set of L2s:
| Product | AUM / TVL (2026) | Category | Issuer | |---|---|---|---| | BlackRock BUIDL | $1.9–2.3B | Tokenized Treasuries | BlackRock / Securitize | | Ondo USDY + OUSG | ~$1.4B | Tokenized Treasuries | Ondo Finance | | Franklin Templeton FOBXX / BENJI | ~$700M | Tokenized money market | Franklin Templeton | | Centrifuge (pool AUM) | ~$500M+ | Private credit | Centrifuge | | Maple Finance | ~$1B | Private credit | Maple |
Aggregate tokenized U.S. Treasuries stood at approximately $5.8 billion in early 2026, per RedStone and The Defiant reporting. Total onchain RWAs span a wider range, $12–21 billion, depending on whether stablecoins, tokenized gold, and permissioned credit lines are included.
Pharos enters this market with zero AUM at mainnet launch. Its differentiation is not in capturing tokenized Treasuries — a market that BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and Ondo have effectively locked in via custodial and broker-dealer relationships — but in originating a new asset class: tokenized energy cash flows from GCL. If that origination pipeline materializes at meaningful scale, Pharos could define a category the way Centrifuge defined tokenized trade receivables. If it does not, Pharos becomes another RWA-labeled L1 competing for developer attention in a market where the incumbents are not chains but issuers.
Applied to the webthreepedia economic-value framework, the Pharos raise raises a familiar question: where does the recurring on-chain revenue come from?
The webthreepedia foundational analysis found that of roughly $86–113 billion in annual blockchain sector funding, only $13–14 billion flows from transparent on-chain fees. The remainder — 85–90% — is subsidy-driven, composed of token unlocks, issuance, venture injections, and foundation grants. New L1s are among the most subsidy-heavy categories: they typically enter the market with large pre-allocated token supplies, pay incentives to attract TVL, and operate at negative net revenue for years before fee income covers validator rewards.
Pharos has not published tokenomics for its Q2 2026 TGE. Based on comparable L1 launches (Sui, Sei, Monad testnet economics, Berachain), a reasonable expectation is:
Without those parameters, the $1 billion valuation cannot be stress-tested against revenue. If GCL's energy tokenization delivers $100 million in notional tokenized assets at a 10 bps annual protocol fee, Pharos would generate $100,000 per year from that anchor relationship. To justify a $1 billion valuation at a standard fee-capture multiple, the network would need several orders of magnitude more volume — which implies either a large organic DeFi ecosystem or significant GCL-driven expansion into energy and carbon markets.
The more honest framing is that the Series A price is not an enterprise-value-of-cashflows number. It is a strategic option on a category that does not yet have a dominant L1. Pharos is one of roughly a dozen L1s (Plume, Mantra, Canton Network, Provenance, Avalanche Evergreen subnets, Injective, Redbelly) explicitly marketing themselves as RWA-native. The winner, if there is one, will be determined by which network captures the issuer relationships, not by TPS benchmarks.
Pharos's decision to anchor the deal through an HKEX-listed investor is a deliberate positioning choice. Hong Kong's regulatory regime for virtual asset service providers and tokenized products has tightened through 2025 and 2026, with the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) granting licenses to a small number of exchanges and issuers. A HKEX-listed company making a disclosed equity investment in an L1 must answer to its auditors and to the exchange on the investment's business rationale. That introduces a layer of public-market scrutiny absent from standard venture rounds.
The Pharos team also highlights its zero-knowledge KYC/AML modules. These are designed to allow permissioned flows on an otherwise public ledger — a technical pattern that most institutional-facing L1s are converging on because it accommodates both regulator expectations and open-DeFi composability. Whether the implementation holds up to adversarial review is unknown; no public audit of Pharos's KYC primitives has been released as of April 2026.
The network's Asia-first positioning is strategically distinct from the U.S.-centric RWA players. BlackRock, Ondo, and Franklin Templeton are structured for U.S. broker-dealer distribution and SEC compliance. Pharos is structured for Hong Kong, Japan (via Sumitomo), and mainland Chinese industrial asset origination. That is a real addressable market — but it depends heavily on the cross-border regulatory environment remaining permissive.
The Pharos raise is a well-structured transaction by L1-launch standards: a credible founding team from Ant Group, a HKEX-listed industrial anchor with a public-market audit trail, a Fortune 500 strategic investor, and a regulatory-forward compliance architecture. Those are not trivial. Most new L1s launch with neither institutional backing nor a defined asset-origination pipeline.
The open questions are the ones that apply to every RWA-native L1. Tokenomics will determine whether the $1 billion valuation is sustained or compresses at TGE. Fee capture will determine whether the network generates on-chain revenue or joins the 85–90% of blockchain ecosystem value that flows from subsidy rather than user fees. And GCL's willingness to actually move energy assets on-chain, at disclosed volume and fee terms, will determine whether the strategic partnership is a commercial engine or a marketing asset.
Data through April 8, 2026 is sufficient to confirm the deal terms and investor set. It is not sufficient to judge the execution. That judgment will come at mainnet launch, at the first GCL tokenization disclosure, and at the first public audit of protocol fee revenue. Until then, the Pharos story is a bet on Asia-origin RWAs as a distinct category, priced at the valuation a handful of strategic investors were willing to underwrite.