How Pharos Is Redefining High-Performance Blockchains
In Brief
Pharos CEO Wish Wu shares how his journey from building AntChain to launching Pharos—a high-performance Layer-1 that hit over a million TestNet transactions in its first week—is bridging Web2 institutions, assets, and users into Web3.
When Pharos launched its TestNet earlier this year, it hit over one million transactions in the very first week, quickly trending on Twitter and ranking at the top of project dashboards. In this interview, co-founder and CEO Wish Wu shares how his journey from building AntChain, Asia’s largest consortium blockchain, led to creating Pharos, a high-performance Layer-1 designed to bridge Web2 institutions, assets, and users into Web3.
Could you share your journey into Web3?
I’m Wish, currently the co-founder and CEO of Pharos. We started Pharos in the middle of last year. But before that, I was part of Ant’s blockchain infrastructure team. Together with my co-founder Alex, we got into blockchain technology back in 2017. At that time, it was a research lab under Alibaba’s Damo Academy.
We started building blockchain infrastructure for a consortium blockchain in China called AntChain. By the time we left Ant, it had become the largest consortium blockchain in Asia. The research lab grew into an R&D center and eventually became one of the four main business groups of Ant Group, now called Ant Digital Technologies.
We built consortium blockchain solutions for many businesses in China, including supply chain, finance, government tracing systems, and other industries. We also supported JingTan, which has become the largest NFT marketplace in China. Because of this, the requirements for the underlying blockchain infrastructure were similar to those for Web2: very high throughput and a huge user base. At that time, we reached around 100k TPS with over a billion user accounts supported.
Last year, we left Ant and started Pharos, which is still building on the AntChain tech stack. Like Aptos and Sui coming out of Meta, we received technical support from Ant and spun out the technology to launch this project. We quickly raised a seed round led by Hack VC and Elastic Factory in September last year. Earlier this year, we launched the Devnet internally, and in May, we launched the Testnet publicly. It gained significant traction—over a million transactions in the first week, and even trended globally on Twitter.
What we’re building is high-performance, scalable, and specifically designed for institutional-grade applications. Features like SPNs allow customization, privacy, and support for specialized hardware such as GPUs and ZK solutions. Ultimately, our goal is to onboard institutional assets, capital, and Web2 users into Web3 through Pharos.
How does your modular three-layer structure: L1 base, L1 core, and extensions, work together to improve performance and scalability?
We designed Pharos with three layers. At the base is hardware integration: CPUs, GPUs, and specialized hardware to support different transaction and application requirements.
The middle layer is the consensus layer. We use an asynchronous BFT consensus algorithm that allows all validators to propose blocks simultaneously. This improves bandwidth utilization, increases throughput, avoids single points of failure, and ensures fairness since even validators with higher latency can still propose blocks.
On top of that, the extension layer supports a wide variety of applications. For example, we have a dual VM: one fully compatible with Solidity, and another WebAssembly VM that supports languages like JavaScript, Java, or C++. This allows developers to build smart contracts using languages they’re already familiar with and integrate easily with existing systems.
We’re also building a toolchain so developers can write their entire application, frontend, backend, and smart contracts, in JavaScript, then deploy everything with one click. This makes development on Pharos highly accessible and efficient.
You mentioned SPNs as a unique feature. How do they differ from sidechains or traditional Layer-2 solutions?
SPNs are like sub-net within the same Layer-1 network. Unlike Layer-2s, which segregate liquidity and tokens, SPNs remain part of the same Layer-1, keeping liquidity unified.
For example, a bank can build its own SPN on Pharos to keep client data private with TEE or ZK protection while still benefiting from the shared liquidity and validator security of the Layer-1. SPNs also let institutions use specialized hardware, like GPUs or ZK accelerators—directly via SDKs. This combination of privacy, customization, and liquidity unites SPNs apart from sidechains or L2s.
What challenges did you face with state bloat, and how does Pharos address these differently from other blockchains?
State bloat is a huge issue. At Ant, we faced it during campaigns like Alipay’s Chinese New Year NFT drops, where nearly a billion users participated in a short time. Traditional KV databases like RocksDB weren’t designed for blockchain’s Merkle tree structure, which requires two-layer traversals and causes inefficiency.
We solved this by rewriting the database from scratch as a blockchain-native solution. We pushed the Merkle tree structure directly into the database layer, optimized disk alignment, and introduced compression so that only modified parts ofthe data are stored. This dramatically improved performance and reduced state growth, ensuring scalability even with massive user activity.
Can you share a real-world example of how a decentralized data exchange protocol could enable innovative AI applications on-chain?
While the exact term may vary, what we focus on is enabling AI applications through SPNs. Many AI+crypto projects require TEE and GPU resources to ensure agent ownership and efficient operation.
Instead of building entirely new blockchains or relying on centralized cloud providers, SPNs on Pharos provide TEE for privacy and GPU for computation. Developers can deploy open-source AI models directly on-chain while maintaining ownership and compliance. This effectively enables real on-chain AI applications.
Beyond DeFi, which industries do you believe will benefit most from SPN-driven computing and modular blockchain infrastructure?
Payments and stablecoins, without a doubt. DeFi already needs high throughput, but payments require both speed and real-time finality. For example, Visa’s network handles up to 90,000 TPS with sub-second latency. Traditional blockchains can’t match that, but Pharos can finalize transactions in under a second.
This makes us well-suited for real-world payment systems, stablecoin transactions, and other industries that demand high performance, reliability, and regulatory compliance.
What’s your vision for the future of Web3 infrastructure, and where does Pharos fit in the next five to ten years?
Our vision is to connect Web2 and Web3 in three main ways:
Assets: Onboard institutional assets as RWAs and create a full ecosystem where they can be traded, used as collateral, or integrated into stablecoins.
Capital: Attracting traditional investors who may not fully understand crypto but are comfortable with tokenized real-world assets.
Users: Collaborating with regulated institutions and companies to onboard Web2 users into Web3 through familiar platforms, stablecoins, and RWAs. Pharos will be the infrastructure to make this transition seamless.
If you could highlight one breakthrough or achievement that sets Pharos apart, what would it be?
From a technology perspective, we’ve built one of the highest-performance Layer-1 blockchains by innovating across consensus, storage, execution, and SPN architecture, all in-house. From a business perspective, our ability to bridge assets, capital, and users from Web2 into Web3 positions us uniquely to drive mass adoption.
Finally, are there any new features on the roadmap?
Our mainnet is scheduled to launch later this year. Early next year, we’ll roll out the first SPN use cases in collaboration with institutions, showing how blockchain can be adopted in real-world, internet-scale scenarios.
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About The Author
Victoria is a writer on a variety of technology topics including Web3.0, AI and cryptocurrencies. Her extensive experience allows her to write insightful articles for the wider audience.
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Victoria is a writer on a variety of technology topics including Web3.0, AI and cryptocurrencies. Her extensive experience allows her to write insightful articles for the wider audience.
