Pharos Network, a Layer 1 blockchain focused on tokenizing real-world assets (RWAs), has raised $44 million in a Series A funding round. This investment brings the project's total funding to $52 million and reportedly values the company at approximately $1 billion ahead of its upcoming mainnet launch.
The funding round was led by a consortium of investors bridging traditional finance and the crypto sector. Key backers include Asia-based private equity funds, regulated financial institutions in Hong Kong, and the corporate venture capital arm of Sumitomo Corporation. Strategic crypto-native participants featured SNZ Holding, Chainlink, and Flow Traders.
Pharos plans to use the capital to expand its onchain RWA infrastructure across Asia and beyond, scale its existing testnet traction, and advance its "RealFi" vision toward institutional execution. The network is designed as a "financial-grade, asset-native" Layer 1, built on a deep-parallel execution architecture with built-in compliance features. Its stated goal is to bridge over $50 trillion in RWAs, traditional finance (TradFi), and cross-chain capital into a modular onchain economy.
The company reports significant activity on its Atlantic Ocean Testnet, claiming millions of users and hundreds of millions of unique addresses. It has also secured a strategic capital partnership with energy firm GCL to pilot energy-backed RWAs. The project is led by former Ant Group executives and supported by a team with backgrounds from Ant, Microsoft Research, and Stanford.
This funding round underscores the growing institutional interest in the RWA sector. Data cited in the announcement shows total real-world assets onchain have grown from $14 billion at the start of the year to $24.3 billion currently.
