Messari’s new report on Pharos puts one of the more ambitious Layer 1 projects on the radar at exactly the moment tokenized finance is moving from theory to infrastructure. The report describes Pharos as a modular blockchain built to serve as global infrastructure for real-world assets, created by former Ant Group executives who previously worked on blockchain infrastructure at the Chinese fintech giant. It also says the network is targeting mainnet and its token generation event in Q2 2026, following the launch of its AtlanticOcean testnet in October 2025.
What sets Pharos apart, at least on paper, is not just speed claims but the way it tries to attack blockchain bottlenecks from every layer at once. Messari says the chain is designed to parallelize the full block lifecycle, including consensus, execution, storage, and data availability, rather than only transaction execution. That is how the project says it can aim for 30,000 transactions per second on mainnet, while its testnet materials even advertise 30,000 TPS with one-second finality. In other words, Pharos is trying to make throughput a system-level property instead of a single-engine optimization.
The storage layer is one of the most interesting parts of the design. According to Messari, Pharos Store embeds the Merkle tree directly into the storage engine, which is intended to collapse the usual disk-read path from roughly eight to ten reads down to one to three. That matters because storage often becomes the hidden ceiling for high-performance chains long before execution does. If the project can actually deliver that kind of improvement outside of controlled testing, it would be a meaningful technical step for onchain workloads that need to move fast without compromising state integrity.
Next-Gen Layer 1 for RealFi Expansion
Pharos is also leaning hard into virtual machine interoperability. The report says its DeTerministic Virtual Machine, or DTVM, unifies EVM and WASM under one deterministic runtime, which lets Solidity contracts interact natively with Rust contracts without bridges or cross-VM friction. That is a notable pitch for builders who want Ethereum compatibility on one side and high-performance programming languages on the other. Messari’s report says the system relies on a deterministic middle layer, called dMIR, to keep execution identical across different hardware environments.
Another major piece is Special Processing Networks, or SPNs. These are application-specific execution layers that inherit security from the main network through native restaking, instead of forcing each new environment to bootstrap its own validator set. In practical terms, Pharos is betting that some workloads, such as derivatives trading, ZK verification, AI orchestration, or other compute-heavy applications, will need dedicated execution environments that still stay connected to the broader liquidity base. That is the kind of modular story the market has been hearing more often lately, but Pharos is pushing it into the RWA and institutional finance lane.
That positioning is important because the broader RWA market is already large and active. RWA.xyz currently shows about $26.50 billion in distributed asset value across tokenized real-world assets, with tokenized U.S. Treasuries alone around the $10 billion mark. Reuters also reported today that the NYSE is teaming up with Securitize to develop a tokenized securities platform, a sign that institutional tokenization is no longer a side experiment. Pharos is entering that conversation with a thesis built around “RealFi,” not just DeFi, and that gives the project a more specific business narrative than many Layer 1s chasing generic throughput.
There is also a funding and ecosystem story behind the technology. Pharos raised an $8 million seed round in November 2024, co-led by Lightspeed Faction and Hack VC, and later rolled out ecosystem and foundation initiatives around RWA infrastructure, builders, and alliances. Its official site says the network has been expanding partnerships through 2025 and 2026, including RealFi-focused efforts with Centrifuge and other infrastructure providers. That matters because performance claims are easier to believe when a project is already attracting institutional-facing partners before the mainnet.
For now, the most important market takeaway is that Pharos does not yet have a public token price to analyze. With mainnet and TGE still expected in Q2 2026, the story is still one of buildout, testing, and ecosystem formation rather than open-market trading. If the network can translate its technical architecture into real usage, especially in RWAs and institutional finance, it could arrive at launch with a stronger case than most Layer 1s. If not, it risks joining the long list of chains with impressive whitepaper math but limited real-world traction. For now, Messari’s report suggests the project is trying to solve the right problems, and doing so at a time when the market is finally paying attention to them.
