With $52 million in announced funding and a reported global community of 1.5 million, Pharos is building around a bigger question: what happens after real-world assets arrive onchain? CEO Wish Wu tells Blockster why distribution, liquidity and agents are central to the answer.

Putting a financial asset on a blockchain answers one question: how can it be represented onchain?

It leaves several others open. Who will buy it? Where can investors trade it? Can they use it in other financial applications? And how much technical knowledge will they need to participate?

For Pharos co-founder and CEO Wish Wu, those questions define the next phase of real-world assets.

Speaking with Blockster’s Alex Bowman at Korea Blockchain Week 2026, Wu described a network focused on connecting asset issuance with the markets and applications that make those assets useful. Pharos’ push into agents fits that same ambition: helping people navigate and interact with an expanding financial ecosystem.

As Blockster explored in its Korea Blockchain Week recap, the institutional ambitions on display in Seoul came with practical questions about liquidity, investor protections and dependable financial infrastructure. Wu’s interview brings those questions into focus through Pharos: once assets arrive onchain, how do you build markets people keep using?

“We want those assets to flow in our ecosystem, not only just stay there.”

— Wish Wu, co-founder and CEO of Pharos

From Ant Group to Onchain Finance

Wu brings an institutional technology background to that challenge. Before Pharos, he served as chief security officer at ZAN, Ant Group’s Web3 business, with experience in distributed systems and network security.

That background provides context for his emphasis on the infrastructure surrounding an asset: how institutions issue it, how users access it and what controls govern the activity around it.

In the interview, Wu highlighted Pharos’ relationships with asset issuers across Asia-Pacific. He said the team’s previous work and experience building Pharos helped establish credibility with institutions in the region.

“Based on our past working experience and when we’re building Pharos, we have built our reputation with those institutions in APAC,” he said.

He described Pharos’ value to issuers as helping them “not only tokenize their assets, but also distribute the assets.”

Pharos’ pitch in a competitive blockchain market rests on connecting those two jobs. Wu points to relationships with Asia-Pacific issuers, DeFi applications that give investors ways to use their holdings, and agents designed to make those applications easier to navigate.

Together, they give Pharos a specific proposition: help institutions bring products to market, reach investors and support activity after issuance.

The Capital Behind the Network

Pharos has attracted substantial funding for that effort. In April 2026, the company announced a $44 million Series A, bringing disclosed funding to $52 million, following an $8 million seed round in November 2024.

Lightspeed Faction and Hack VC led the seed round. The Series A announcement named a Sumitomo Corporation subsidiary, SNZ and Flow Traders among its participants, alongside other backers whose identities were not disclosed.

That mix reflects the market Pharos is trying to serve. Building around real-world assets requires access to traditional issuers as well as the developers and market participants who understand onchain finance.

Wu described the benefits of working with partners familiar with both environments.

“They are familiar with institutions, how it works,” he said. “And also, they have stepped into the crypto world. They know how the on-chain ecosystem works.”

The investment gives Pharos resources to build. Its institutional relationships can help bring assets into the ecosystem. The next challenge is connecting those assets with users and functioning markets.

What the Numbers Say About Onchain Activity

Pharos launched its Pacific Ocean Mainnet on April 28, 2026. In its mainnet launch announcement, the company said its pAlpha High Yield RWA Vault had attracted more than $15 million in initial commitments, subsequently reaching its $50 million capacity within days. Those were reported milestones for the vault, rather than a measure of today’s network liquidity.

As of October 5, DefiLlama’s Pharos dashboard showed approximately $76.8 million in DeFi total value locked, measuring capital within tracked DeFi protocols; $133.1 million in active real-world assets under management; and $12 million in stablecoin market capitalization.

These categories should not be added together as a single liquidity total. Assets under management, DeFi deposits and stablecoin supply describe different aspects of the ecosystem and can overlap. None alone establishes how easily investors can trade a large position.

That is where Wu’s emphasis on putting assets to work becomes relevant. Bringing financial products onchain creates a foundation. Applications determine what investors can do with them.

“So our next question is how users could make use of those assets,” he said. “That’s why we’re building a bunch of DeFi protocols, like lending, DEX, and even perps, that could help people to better utilize their capital and their liquidity around those RWAs.”

Lending markets, decentralized exchanges and perpetual futures serve different purposes. Together, they illustrate Pharos’ direction: creating financial services around the assets it attracts.

Turning a Community Into Participation

Pharos’ website reports 1.5 million global community members and 174 million wallet addresses. These company-reported figures measure different things: community membership describes its audience, while wallet addresses are not a count of unique people or active investors.

For Pharos, the opportunity is to give that audience reasons to keep participating as the ecosystem develops.

A large community can provide a starting point for distribution. Sustained participation depends on the products available, how clearly they are explained and whether users find them useful.

Pharos is also investing in the developer side. In February, it announced Native to Pharos, a $10 million-plus incubator supported by partners including Hack VC, Draper Dragon, Lightspeed Faction and Centrifuge. The program targets financial applications and infrastructure, including exchanges, RWA yield and vault products, and prediction markets.

That connects two parts of the same effort: bringing users into the ecosystem and supporting developers who can build products those users return to.

Why Agents Belong in the RWA Story

Asked about Pharos’ recent brand refresh, Wu pushed back on the premise.

“Yeah, it’s actually not a rebranding,” he said. “It’s just a way of moving further towards agent-native layer 1 infrastructure.”

He described the move as an extension of Pharos’ RealFi strategy: bringing real-world financial value onchain and helping people access it through applications.

“We want to use the agent and AI capabilities to benefit the user when they are interacting with the chain.”

The connection is practical. As more products become available, users have more opportunities to assess and more interfaces to navigate.

Wu sees agents helping people explore what they can invest in and which activities they can participate in across Pharos. He also argued that controlling the network’s technology stack allows the team to improve support for agents from the underlying blockchain upward.

In that vision, agents become part of how users access financial services. Developers, meanwhile, gain infrastructure for building those experiences into their applications.

One Agent Across Multiple Applications

Wu pointed to Pharos’ agent widget as an example. According to his description, developers can add the widget to an application’s front end with one line of code. Behind the integration sits a cloud-hosted agent network.

When a user connects a wallet, the system automatically creates an agent account. The agent connects with tools, skills and application agents that support interactions with the service.

The intended benefit is continuity across applications.

“If more and more applications in the Pharos ecosystem are using this widget, the user can bring their own agent to all of those applications,” Wu said.

For users, that could reduce the need to learn a different interaction process whenever they try a new service. For developers, it offers a way to introduce agent functionality through shared infrastructure.

Bowman also asked how Pharos would manage autonomy and safeguards. Wu pointed to authentication and identity infrastructure, describing the goal as allowing agents to act on users’ behalf while users retain control of their assets.

That balance will matter as agents take on more financial tasks. Users need to understand what they have authorized and where their agent’s permissions end.

Prosper Tests Another Route to RWA Participation

The interview also explored Prosper, an ecosystem project approaching RWAs through performance-linked tokens.

Bowman described its model as using verifiable performance data as a reference without tokenized ownership. Wu characterized the tokens as tied to the performance of RWAs and vault creators, with the aim of attracting crypto liquidity and increasing activity around those markets.

“It’s not purely just a meme, but a performance token for the RWAs and for the vault creators,” Wu said.

The ownership distinction matters: a token referencing performance gives its holder a different proposition from ownership of the underlying asset.

Wu sees potential for Pharos’ agent capabilities to support both strategies developed by curators and the experience of users trading those products. He also pointed to Pharos’ existing base of issuers, investors and vault curators as a foundation Prosper could build upon.

The project illustrates another part of Pharos’ strategy: creating multiple ways for users and developers to participate around real-world assets.

Institutional Finance Moves on a Different Clock

Why has RWA adoption sometimes appeared slower than crypto participants expected?

Wu argued that the comparison overlooks the work involved in bringing a traditional financial product onchain. Regulation, legal structures and decisions about how the product is represented all require attention.

“It’s much more complicated than just issuing a token.”

From an institutional perspective, he said, the market is moving quickly.

“We see a lot of partners from Wall Street, from Hong Kong. They are participating in this game, and they are moving really fast.”

His point explains why technical readiness is only one part of adoption. A blockchain can be ready to process transactions before a financial product is ready for distribution.

Relationships with issuers and institutions therefore matter alongside the network itself. They help determine which products reach the market and how investors can access them.

That practical emphasis also connects Wu’s interview with the broader questions raised at KBW: how institutional interest becomes lasting participation, and what financial services need to be in place to support it.

The Next Test: Assets People Actually Use

Asked about the roadmap, Wu returned to two priorities: expanding the RealFi ecosystem and developing infrastructure that supports more activity through agents.

“For the next few months, we’re heavily focused on the DeFi protocols and ecosystem: how we can bring the RWA assets into DeFi so people can better utilize their capital and have more efficiency on the liquidity,” he said.

Pharos’ funding, community and onchain assets give it a foundation to work from. Its next phase depends on connecting them: helping issuers reach investors, giving investors useful applications and making those applications easier to navigate.

That is the argument running through Wu’s interview. The value of tokenization grows when an asset becomes part of a functioning market—with participants who can access it, understand it and put it to use.

Reporting by Lidia Yadlos

CEO Wish WuInterviewKorea Blockchain WeekOnchain FinancePharos NetworkRWAs