Pharos, a developer of a Layer 1 blockchain targeting fintech use cases, has raised $8 million in a seed funding round.
Lightspeed Faction and Hack VC co-led the round, with SNZ Capital participating as a strategic anchor investor, Pharos said Friday. Additional investors include Dispersion Capital, Hash Global, Generative Ventures, MH Ventures, Zion and Chorus One.
Pharos began raising money for this round in July and closed it in September, co-founder and CEO Alex Zhang told The Block. The round was structured as a simple agreement for future equity (SAFE) with token warrants, Zhang said, declining to disclose the post-round valuation.
Pharos is a crypto startup building a Layer 1 blockchain network designed to bridge traditional fintech services with web3 technologies. Asked why Pharos is creating a new Layer 1 blockchain and what limitations in existing Layer 1 and Layer 2 networks it aims to address, Zhang cited scalability as a core barrier to "true mass adoption" of web3.
"Pharos network aims to establish a unique payment-grade web3 infrastructure," Zhang said, adding that the network would deliver "a web2-equivalent user experience at the scale of billions of user accounts globally."
Real-time payments and real-world assets (RWAs) are two primary use cases Pharos will prioritize, according to Zhang. To that end, Pharos has announced a strategic partnership with ZAN, the web3 brand of Ant Digital Technologies, a subsidiary of the Chinese fintech giant Ant Group. Together, they aim to develop web3 infrastructure focused on node services, security and hardware.
Zhang highlighted that the partnership with ZAN will concentrate on RWA use cases, while another partnership with Worldwide Stablecoin Payment Network (WSPN) will focus on stablecoin payment use cases. More partnerships are in the pipeline, he added.
Pharos envisions an ecosystem of "web3 SuperApps" powered by "hyper-parallelism across consensus, execution, storage and heterogeneous hardware." In terms of scalability, Pharos seeks to support 50,000 transactions per second (TPS). For comparison, the theoretical maximum TPS for Solana and Ethereum Layer 2 network Arbitrum are 65,000 and 40,000, respectively, per Chainspect data.
The Pharos network is currently in an internal development phase, with plans to launch a testnet in Q1 2025 and a mainnet later in the year, Zhang said. When asked about a potential network token launch, Zhang said, "A network utility token is an option."
Pharos operates with fewer than 10 employees across the U.S., Hong Kong and Singapore, and Zhang plans to expand the team to over 20 members, by hiring in cryptography, marketing and ecosystem development roles.
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