Pharos Network announced the launch of its AtlanticOcean Testnet this week, a move the team says will widen global access to real-world asset (RWA) finance and ramp up the network’s capacity for large-scale, cross-border liquidity flows. The new testnet is positioned as the next evolutionary step for Pharos: where early, regional pilots proved the concept, AtlanticOcean aims to act as a global bridge, letting institutions, builders and partners simulate and stress-test how tokenized assets might move between markets and jurisdictions before the mainnet goes live.
Pharos’s engineering team points to strong early signals of readiness. Since May, the project’s first testnet has reportedly processed nearly 3 billion transactions across some 23 million blocks with a 0.5-second block time, while establishing a worldwide validator set and achieving full compatibility with Ethereum’s Dencun SPEC for reliable block replay. The network has also introduced performance improvements such as parallel execution, improved caching, and low-memory node builds, all intended to make real-world testing smoother and cheaper at scale.
AtlanticOcean brings several major upgrades atop that foundation. Pharos released an official PoS tokenomics model aligned with the planned mainnet, a 1 billion total supply, and added more user-friendly staking and validator voting tools. The stack has been refactored into a modular architecture that decouples consensus, execution, node, and storage layers. Consensus and execution were both optimized through pipeline-based consensus improvements and hybrid parallel execution that combines DAG-based and Block-STM V1 approaches, while storage got a cache-first redesign with the new PharosDB.
Global Access to Real-World Asset Finance
Together, these changes are meant to enable more composable, complex testing scenarios for developers and enterprise partners. Partnerships and integrations have been a running theme in Pharos’s build-up, and AtlanticOcean launches with a similar ecosystem posture. The project highlighted collaborations with Morpho Labs, Bitverse, Euclid and others, and pointed to wallet and tooling integrations including OKX Wallet, Bitget Wallet, Hemera Explorer and Goldsky, moves Pharos says validate the network’s readiness for scaled, real-world testing and developer adoption.
“Based on what we have built now, we validated the foundation of Pharos, excellent performance, fair access, and scalable execution,” said Wish Wu, Co-founder & CEO of Pharos Network. “AtlanticOcean builds on that success. From here, Pharos goes global. We push the limits of scale, memory, and speed before real assets flow on-chain. We focus on the digital rails for liquidity to move freely between institutions, protocols, and people worldwide.”
The team says AtlanticOcean will run in staged activations, with the original testnet co-existing for several months so partners can migrate gradually and top-performing community validators can be invited to join AtlanticOcean and future mainnet sets. Pharos is aiming to sustain momentum toward a mainnet debut planned for Q1 2026, a timetable the project describes as a crucial milestone on its path to global on-chain RWA finance.
Institutions, RWA partners and builders interested in exploring the testnet can begin testing and contributing through Pharos’s testnet portal. Backed by investors such as Hack VC and Faction VC, Pharos casts itself as a next-generation financial Layer 1 that links real-world assets, TradFi rails and cross-chain liquidity into a single programmable network built for high-throughput DeFi and enterprise-grade finance.
