Most new Layer 1s pitch speed. Pharos pitches speed with a purpose: bringing real-world asset finance on-chain at a scale where banks, funds and payment companies can actually use it. That focus changes what the chain asks of its validators, and after running Pharos infrastructure since mainnet launch, we have a clear picture of what those demands look like in practice. This post covers how the chain works, what we run for it, and what PHRS stakers should know.
What Pharos is, in one paragraph
Pharos is an EVM-compatible Layer 1 with a pipelined, parallel execution engine. Instead of processing transactions one after another like a stock EVM chain, it splits the work of consensus, execution and storage into stages that run simultaneously, and it executes non-conflicting transactions in parallel. The goal is tens of thousands of TPS with roughly one-second finality, while keeping full compatibility with existing Ethereum contracts and tooling. Developers deploy Solidity as-is. The heavy lifting happens below the contract layer.
Why real-world assets need this
RWA workloads are not like DeFi trading. They bring steady, high-volume flows: interest distributions to thousands of holders, batched settlement runs, compliance checks on every transfer. Three properties matter more than headline TPS:
- Predictable fees. An issuer distributing yield to ten thousand wallets needs to know the cost before the run starts, not discover it during a gas spike.
- Deterministic finality. Settlement systems reconcile against block timestamps. A chain that finalizes in about a second, every second, is easier to plug into existing back offices than one that finalizes in a burst.
- Native compliance hooks. Pharos exposes primitives for permissioned asset pools alongside the open EVM, so regulated issuers and open DeFi share one settlement layer.
What parallel execution means for a validator
Parallelism moves the bottleneck. On a sequential chain, one fast core and a decent disk keep you in consensus. On Pharos, the execution engine fans out across cores, and the storage layer absorbs concurrent state writes. Our production spec reflects that:
| Dimension | Sequential EVM chain | Our Pharos spec |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | Fast single core dominates | High core count and high clock, both matter |
| Memory | 16 to 32 GB comfortable | 64 GB minimum, state cache is the hot path |
| Storage | Good NVMe | Enterprise NVMe, tested under concurrent writes |
| Monitoring focus | Missed blocks | Execution-lane stalls and state-contention rate |
The last row deserves a note. When parallel lanes hit conflicting state, the engine re-executes the losers sequentially. A workload heavy in conflicts quietly eats your headroom while consensus still looks healthy. We track re-execution rate as a first-class metric and alert when it trends up, because it is the earliest warning that block times are about to feel pressure.
Operator note: benchmark with realistic RWA-style traffic, meaning batched transfers touching many independent accounts. Synthetic single-account spam tests the wrong path entirely on a parallel EVM.
Our involvement
- Mainnet validator since launch, with 99.9% signing participation and zero slashing events. Commission is 5%, visible on-chain.
- Testnet first, always. Every node release runs at least 72 hours on our Pharos testnet infrastructure before it touches mainnet.
- Public RPC endpoints for developers building on Pharos, with dedicated capacity available for teams that need guaranteed throughput.
For PHRS stakers
Staking PHRS with Helios is non-custodial. You delegate from your own wallet, rewards accrue every epoch, and undelegation completes after a 7-day unbonding period. Current gross APR sits around 12.5%, and our Pharos staking page shows the live price, the net rate after commission, and a calculator for your amount. The same page has a step-by-step guide using MetaMask or any EVM wallet.
RWA finance does not forgive downtime. That is exactly the kind of network we like validating, because the standard it demands is the standard we already run.
Questions about Pharos infrastructure, or want a dedicated endpoint for your team? Get in touch and an engineer will reply. For the hardware side of high-throughput validation, our Somnia field report pairs well with this one.