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2025 marked the first full year of execution following Pharos’ mission. From the outset, the team had a clear objective and grew steadily, by advancing along a single, coherent path toward a RealFi-native network ready for the next phase.
Across 12 months, Pharos has progressed from early stage to a Testnet environment, supporting sustained on-chain activity, a growing ecosystem, and a globally distributed community. Billions of transactions, millions of active users on a monthly basis, and hundreds of millions of engaged wallets and unique addresses across 7 months’ Testnet phases, signal that the foundation for 2026 was no longer narrative, but operational.
In a market dominated by TPS and speculative cycles, Pharos' strategic choice made early in the year was to design every public environment as if it would eventually carry real financial consequence.
Targets around throughput, gas capacity, and finality existed not to compete for attention, but to anchor expectations around what RealFi infrastructure must sustain continuously, not occasionally.
Throughout 2025, this philosophy translated into disciplined iteration with 15 major Testnet large or small upgrades delivered by the tech team, ensuring that performance gains were accompanied by stability, predictability, and forward compatibility. The transition from initial public access to Mainnet readiness happened within a single year in a pace that reflects both clarity of direction and disciplined execution.
Across 2025, Pharos transitioned from controlled testing to sustained running load. Pharos consistently supported continuous participation from an average of 2.5 million monthly active users, with peak periods exceeding 3.1 million, while cumulative transaction volume surpassed 4.3 billion on Testnet. More importantly, these activities were generated by over 209 million unique wallets across all year's testing phases. During peak conditions, the system processed over 40 million transactions within single periods, creating recurring stress scenarios under live conditions. These moments were not treated as promotional benchmarks, but as operational checkpoints which were used to validate stability, execution consistency, and recovery behavior at scale. Over time, this cadence of real load transformed the Testnet from a proving ground into a rehearsal environment for Mainnet-level expectations.
The launch of the Pharos AtlanticOcean Testnet in Q4 marked a clear shift in posture. This phase was less about pushing boundaries and more about rehearsing continuity: validator onboarding, migration assumptions, and operational readiness under conditions designed to closely resemble Mainnet. Scale was no longer a variable to test, but a baseline assumption for what came next.
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Infrastructure alone does not produce a financial network. In RealFi, the absence of long-term application capital is not a temporary gap, but it is a structural failure that delays real economic behavior. This understanding shaped Pharos’ ecosystem strategy in 2025. Rather than waiting for the infrastructure to be perceived as “ready,” Pharos committed early to application formation, recognizing that financial-grade products require longer design cycles, deeper iteration, and alignment with the network’s economic assumptions.
To support this, Pharos established a $20 million ecosystem fund, with a dedicated allocation toward early-stage incubation and long-horizon investment. The objective was to ensure that teams building on Pharos could mature in parallel with the network itself—testing assumptions, refining financial logic, and adapting to real usage conditions well before Mainnet. This approach allowed the ecosystem to develop intent and coherence, rather than arrive as a post-launch reaction.
As a result, applications on Pharos began to organize around shared financial primitives rather than isolated use cases. RWAfi and DeFi formed the structural base of the ecosystem, anchoring liquidity, asset issuance, and value exchange, while additional applications emerged around yield generation, asset-backed value, and cash-flow awareness. Over time, these components started to outline an ecosystem map—one in which protocols were designed to interoperate, reinforce one another, and collectively support real financial behavior. By the end of 2025, more than 60 live dApps were active across major Web3 segments, not as standalone products, but as interconnected nodes within an emerging financial network.
Credibility in financial infrastructure is accumulated through alignment, shared responsibility, and operational interdependence. Pharos embedded itself within a network of specialized infrastructure partners throughout 2025: Core network operations were supported by RPC providers such as ZAN and Nirvana, while transaction visibility and data accessibility were enabled through indexing and explorer partners including Hemera and Goldsky. Cross-chain connectivity was established through integrations with Chainlink CCIP, Concero, and Spicenet, complemented by oracle services from Chainlink and Supra.
This approach ensured that each critical function of the network, like data integrity, cross-chain coordination, execution reliability, and observability, was anchored by partners whose incentives and expertise aligned with long-term operation rather than short-term throughput metrics. Over time, these integrations transformed the network from a standalone infrastructure into a system embedded within a broader operational fabric.
In 2025, Pharos approached community building as a long-term capacity investment rather than a short-term growth exercise. The objective was not simply to expand reach, but to cultivate a base of participants capable of understanding, interrogating, and ultimately shaping RealFi systems as they evolved. This required sustained education on protocol design, tech advantages, financial mechanics, and broader industry shifts alongside open discussion around some community decisions.
To support this, transparency and learning were embedded into ongoing marketing operations. Regular explain articles, glossaries, threads, community AMAs and open forums normalized technical explanation and strategic context, while creator and ambassador programs extended structured knowledge outward across regions and languages. Community participation increasingly moved beyond campaign-driven interaction toward deeper engagement.
By year end, this approach translated into both scale and depth. Pharos Discord community surpassed 1 million members, with nearly 600,000 monthly active participants generating over 4.2 million messages. On X, the audience expanded steadily from 20,000 to more than 420,000 followers with a total of 3.9 million engagements. More importantly, Pharos entered 2026 with not just a larger community, but a more participatory support layer—one capable of stress-testing assumptions, refining interfaces, and preparing the network for real-world financial demands.
Beyond infrastructure and ecosystem execution, 2025 was also a year in which Pharos invested in shaping the intellectual and narrative foundations of RealFi. The premise was straightforward: financial infrastructure cannot be meaningfully adopted before the market develops a shared understanding of what it is meant to enable. Ideas, therefore, needed to move ahead of the network, not trail behind it.
Throughout the year, Pharos published more than 60 original pieces, essays, and external commentaries across English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean platforms, collectively reaching 10 million readers. The conversations were carried forward through 35 X Spaces, engaging over 120,000 listeners, and extended offline through nearly 40 gatherings across Asia, Europe, and the Americas, bringing together close to 100,000 builders, institutions, and community participants.
Across both online and offline settings, Pharos reached real participants, listened to how they reason about risk, yield, access, and trust, and used those interactions to refine both product direction and narrative clarity. This feedback loop between execution, dialogue, and iteration became an essential input into how Pharos approached RealFi design.
The focus therefore shifts from expansion to dependability. Pharos will target to provide a clear and transparent on-chain environment where users can access institutional-grade assets and sustainable yield without needing to navigate unnecessary complexity. In parallel, developers are given practical standards, tooling, and composable interfaces that make asset-driven applications economical to build and maintain.
At the ecosystem level, 2026 is about turning real-world assets into real on-chain activity. The team will be working closely with asset originators, RWA protocols, financial institutions, and distribution platforms to enable native issuance and broader circulation on-chain. An asset-led approach anchors this effort, pairing high-quality real-world assets and institutional liquidity with deeply integrated DeFi primitives designed to create durable demand, rather than short-lived liquidity spikes.
These choices are supported by continued investment in network stability, decentralization, and modular execution environments capable of accommodating different settlement and compliance needs. Growth mechanisms — from incentives to developer onboarding — are structured with a long-term lens, favoring capital efficiency, sustained usage, and resilience over short-term speculation.
Ultimately, the ambition for Pharos 2026 is straightforward. To function as a real financial-grade Layer 1 that supports the transition from Web2 to Web3 not in theory, but in day-to-day commercial reality.
RealFi, made real.
