Why We Led the Seed Round of Pharos

It’s rare to find founders who have spent their careers building critical financial systems at a global scale. Pharos, led by the former CTO of AntChain (the blockchain division of Ant Group), was one of those rare opportunities. The individuals behind Pharos managed the systems for one of the world’s largest payments companies and understand probably better than anyone that for blockchain to move beyond speculation and retail use cases, it must function like a true financial system that is highly scalable, fast, and compliant.

Two years ago, we helped the Pharos team spin out and build an ultra-high performance Layer-1 blockchain specifically engineered for real-world financial use cases and enterprise adoption. Today, we’re thrilled to see the team launch mainnet with over 50 applications live on day one. Here’s a look at our investment thesis.

The Opportunity and Pharos’ Solution

Back in 2024, we saw a glaring gap. It was clear to us that most blockchains were brilliant for DeFi and retail experiments but were fundamentally incompatible with the needs of global enterprise. They couldn’t handle billions of accounts, settlement times were slow, there were frictions with on and off ramps, there was no built-in privacy, there were heavy compliance burdens, and liquidity was fragmented.

For an institution to move hundreds of millions on-chain, they need it to be scalable, fast, compliant, private, and interoperable from day one.

Pharos systematically addressed the challenges that prevented institutions from fully embracing blockchain. They built an inclusive Layer-1 blockchain where real value and institutional-grade assets are accessible to both the on-chain economy and traditional institutions. Here’s how:

1. Highly performant: Through some serious tech advantages (some of which are outlined below), Pharos is able to support tens of thousands of transactions per second, <1 second block times, and >1 billion users at once. Here are some of the technical specifications:  
   1. Scalable Consensus (via AsyncBFT): A low-latency protocol where all validators work and process transactions as fast as the data actually arrives. 
   2. Dual-VM Parallel Execution: Simultaneous support for EVM and WASM with a deterministic middle layer that allows Solidity and Rust contracts to interact natively. 
   3. High-Performance Storage: Pharos is able to deliver optimal CPU and I/O efficiency for real-time throughput by embedding the Merkle tree directly into the storage engine.
   4. Specialized Processing Networks (SPNs): Pharos’ modular architecture allows specific workloads (ZK proof generation, high-frequency trading, or AI inference) to run on purpose-built subnetworks that inherit the mainnet’s security via restaking.
2. Compliance-native: Having built financial infrastructure for Ant Group, the team understood that compliance and privacy cannot be second-class citizens or afterthoughts. Pharos offers zk-powered KYC/AML and immutable audit trails that make it viable for regulated institutions. It also offers customizable subnets that allow institutions to create regulated or permissioned applications within the network.
3. Distribution advantages and institutional partnerships: Pharos’ longstanding relationships have led to key strategic partnerships. In our view, this helps to solve fragmentation issues and cold-start problems that we often see across DeFi and new blockchains. Here are three notable partnerships worth mentioning:
   1. Ant Digital Technologies to bring $1.5B in RWAs to Pharos. 
   2. Circle to bring the world’s largest regulated stablecoin to Pharos and a direct on-ramp for other high-quality assets.
   3. GCL New Energy (publicly listed energy giant) to bring renewable energy and other infrastructure assets to Pharos. GCL also invested in Pharos as part of the strategic partnership, valuing Pharos at ~$1B.

Our Investment Thesis

We have long maintained that the future of financial services lies in the inevitable convergence of blockchain rails with traditional assets and securities. This thesis is predicated on the belief that on-chain infrastructure will eventually become the standard for institutional execution, asset tokenization, and global settlement. 

Pharos represents a cornerstone of this conviction, and by backing a top-tier technical team with deep-rooted expertise in traditional finance, we are supporting the builders capable of solving the complex challenges required to move enterprise-grade capital onto the blockchain. 

Pharos’ engineers built Asia’s largest enterprise blockchain, and with over 100 peer-reviewed papers and leadership experience at Ant Financial, PayPal, Microsoft, and Stanford, their technical pedigree is unmatched. 

Conclusion

We believe the next generation of blockchains will be judged on their ability to support the global financial system and massive enterprise-grade capital. The fundamental question for any infrastructure investment like this is whether the team can actually build something that ambitious. With Pharos, we believe the answer is a definitive yes.

Congrats to Wish Wu, Alex Zhang, and the entire Pharos team on the mainnet launch and token debut today. We are proud to be your day one partners!

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