Pharos: Modular and Parallel L1 Blockchain Network — The Infrastructure Bringing Finance Onchain

Pharos is a high-performance, modular, and parallel L1 blockchain network designed to bring real-world finance onchain at institutional scale. InfStones has been an active participant in Pharos' testnet, and with mainnet launch approaching, this is a close look at why Pharos represents one of the most architecturally serious attempts yet to make decentralized finance work for the world's largest capital markets.

The Problem: Why Finance Hasn't Moved Onchain

The promise of onchain finance is well-understood: programmable settlement, global access, composable liquidity, and transparent custody — without the friction of legacy financial rails. Yet institutional adoption has remained stubbornly limited.

The obstacles are real and interconnected. Throughput ceilings on existing networks can't support the transaction volumes that institutional markets require. Settlement finality that takes minutes — let alone hours — is incompatible with how financial instruments are priced and managed. And public blockchains, by design, expose every transaction and position to the open internet, creating regulatory and competitive barriers for institutions operating under confidentiality and data-protection obligations.

Most critically: there has been no L1 that treats compliance as a native protocol property rather than an application-layer concern. Institutions can't build on infrastructure that forces them to solve regulatory problems that the infrastructure itself should handle.

Pharos was architected to address all of these constraints simultaneously — not as a collection of patches on an existing L1, but as a purpose-built network for financial applications at scale.

What Is Pharos?

Pharos is a Modular and Full-Stack Parallel L1 Blockchain Network structured across three primary layers: L1-Base, L1-Core, and L1-Extension. It delivers sub-second finality, 30,000 transactions per second (TPS), and 2 Gigagas per second of computation capacity — alongside integrated ZK-KYC and AML modules that make compliance a native network property, not a bolted-on addition.

The network is backed by $8M in seed funding from Hack VC, Faction VC, and global investors. It has recorded 174 million wallet addresses, 3 billion testnet interactions, and 1.5 million community followers — arriving at mainnet with genuine traction, not just technical claims.

The Architecture: Three Layers, One Unified Network

L1-Base is the foundation layer, delivering industry-leading data availability and hardware acceleration. It handles the raw throughput that financial workloads demand without becoming a bottleneck as the network scales.

L1-Core is the execution engine — a globally distributed, high-performance blockchain network powered by decentralized nodes. This is where Pharos' consensus mechanism and parallel execution live, enabling real-time Web3 experiences through architectural design rather than compromised decentralization.

L1-Extension is the modular surface layer, built on L1-Core to enable three capabilities critical for institutional and RWA applications:

• Special Processing Networks (SPNs) — application-specific blockchain environments with their own execution engines, validator sets,      governance, and restaking incentives. SPNs support custom use cases including HFT systems, ZKML, AI models, and privacy-enhancing computation.
• Native Restaking — enables rapid SPN creation, shared security, and dynamic resource allocation, with excess validator compute generating additional rewards.
• Cross-SPN Interoperation — seamless atomic execution and shared data access across SPNs, enabling multi-VM interactions at the protocol layer.

The Consensus Engine: Responsive, Not Rate-Limited

Most blockchain networks constrain throughput by design. Fixed time intervals between blocks create a hard ceiling on transaction processing regardless of what the underlying network can support. As validator count grows, the single-proposer model becomes a bottleneck — bandwidth concentrates at one node while the rest of the network's capacity goes unused.

Pharos' AsyncBFT consensus solves this with simultaneous proposals from all consensus nodes. Block generation responds to actual network latency rather than a predefined timer — meaning throughput scales with the network's available bandwidth, not against it. Slow or distant nodes can participate proportionally without suppressing overall performance.

In a global testbed of 100 nodes, the Pharos prototype achieved over 130,000 TPS — a ceiling well above current financial application demands, with structural headroom to grow.

Deep-Parallel Execution: Transactions at Full CPU Capacity

Sequential transaction execution is a fundamental bottleneck on most EVM-compatible chains. Pharos' parallel execution engine is built around three coordinated mechanisms:

• Parallel Hint Generation — static analysis and speculative contract execution generates read-write set hints before transactions execute, minimizing conflicts before they occur rather than resolving them afterward.
• Transaction Dependency Analysis — transactions are grouped by dependency graphs and state objects are preloaded in batched I/O operations, eliminating the repeated disk access that degrades sequential performance under load.
• Optimistic Execution and Pipeline Finality — three finality stages (ordering, transaction, and block) converge quickly without sacrificing determinism, enabling oracles, indexers, and DeFi protocols to operate on finalized state in real time.

The dual VM architecture — EVM and WASM running simultaneously — ensures that existing Solidity contracts deploy without modification, while WASM support broadens the development surface for high-performance financial applications that benefit from native-speed execution.

Compliance by Design: The Institutional Unlock

Every blockchain built for institutional use must answer the same question: how does a public, transparent ledger coexist with the confidentiality requirements of regulated finance?

Pharos answers it at the protocol layer with integrated ZK-KYC and AML modules. Zero-knowledge identity verification proves regulatory compliance without exposing the underlying data — keeping positions, strategies, and identities private while satisfying the jurisdictional requirements that govern institutional capital.

Programmable AML modules allow compliance workflows to be encoded directly into protocol behavior, not patched onto application logic after the fact. This is architecturally significant: it means compliance is enforced consistently across the network, not selectively applied by individual application teams.

The SPN architecture compounds this by enabling permissioned application environments that maintain their own governance and validator sets while remaining connected to Pharos' shared liquidity and composable ecosystem. An institution deploying a tokenized fund, a regulated lending protocol, or a compliant payment rail can operate within a permissioned SPN without sacrificing access to the broader network.

The RWA Infrastructure Stack

Pharos is purpose-built around five financial primitives that map directly to the real-world asset economy:

• Tokenized Financial Products — onchain yield and investment strategies accessible to institutions, extending returns to builders, communities, and retail users through programmable distribution
• Instant Payments — cross-border settlements confirmed in under one second, applicable to both individual commerce and enterprise treasury operations
• Compliant Finance — digital identity, ZK-KYC, and programmable AML at the protocol layer, structurally aligned with global regulatory frameworks
• Infrastructure Assets — energy, commodities, and real-estate assets tokenized and made accessible at internet scale, with transparent and borderless markets
• RWA-Backed Stablecoins — stable assets collateralized by verified real-world assets, providing the settlement layer for everyday transactions and institutional activity
  The network's partnership with Ant Digital Technologies — incubating a $1.5 billion RWA exchange pipeline — signals that the institutional demand for this infrastructure is real and already engaged.

SPNs: The Institutional Deployment Model

For institutions and protocol teams that need customizable execution environments without sacrificing mainnet security or shared liquidity, SPNs are the key architectural differentiator.

Unlike traditional L2 solutions that settle back to the primary chain over hours or days, SPNs communicate with the Pharos mainnet in seconds — maintaining composability with the broader ecosystem while operating under their own governance, hardware requirements, and consensus parameters.

For specialized financial workloads, SPNs support:

• TEEs (Trusted Execution Environments) for transaction confidentiality and private computation
• GPU-accelerated execution for ZKML and AI-driven financial models
• HFT-optimized configurations for latency-sensitive market applications
• Full Cross-SPN atomic execution for multi-network financial instruments

An institution building a tokenized asset fund, a regulated DeFi lending platform, or a compliant cross-border payment network can deploy within a permissioned SPN — and still access the full Pharos liquidity surface.

InfStones' Role on Pharos

InfStones has been running enterprise-grade infrastructure on the Pharos testnet, building protocol-specific operational expertise ahead of mainnet launch. This is the same approach applied to every early-stage network in InfStones' portfolio: participate early, operate reliably, and arrive at production with tested infrastructure rather than theoretical readiness.

With over 20,000 nodes supported on over 80 blockchains — and a track record as genesis or early-network operator for Zama, Somnia, Monad, Succinct, and Boundless — InfStones brings production-grade validator infrastructure to the Pharos ecosystem. The same cloud-agnostic, high-availability architecture, automated failover, and 24/7 monitoring that these networks rely on is available to Pharos validators and RPC users from day one.

Looking Ahead: Finance on the Open Ledger

The institutions that will define Web3's next chapter are not waiting for a generic high-performance blockchain. They need a network that handles compliance natively, scales to financial market throughput, supports the customizable execution environments that different asset classes require, and connects to a liquidity surface broad enough to matter.

Pharos is built for exactly that. The combination of modular architecture, deep-parallel execution, AsyncBFT consensus, and protocol-level compliance tooling addresses the structural gaps that have kept institutional capital from moving onchain at scale.

As Pharos approaches mainnet, InfStones is positioned to provide the enterprise-grade, production-grade infrastructure that a network of this ambition demands — supporting the validators, RPC services, and specialized compute workloads that will power the next generation of onchain finance.

InfStones is an active infrastructure participant on the Pharos testnet. For protocols and institutions seeking production-grade validator and node infrastructure on Pharos, visit infstones.com.