Pharos Network, a financial Layer 1 blockchain, has announced a new coordinated AI Agent Native upgrade to its protocol and ecosystem updates, as the company disclosed to Finbold on Wednesday, September 30.
Announced at the Korea Blockchain Week keynote stage, the new upgrade combines live sponsored transactions on Testnet with new experiences powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and marketed to users and developers alike.
The rollout begins today and will continue throughout the quarter, covering a range of new features, including an Agent Native upgrade to the Pharos Testnet, the Pharos Port Agent Widget for natural-language RealFi interactions, and the launch of the Pharos AI portal at ai.pharos.xyz.
In addition, the team has announced an AnvitaMate x Pharos collaboration and put out a roadmap for the Agent-Native Chain, also scheduled to release in the same time period.
AI agents as native onchanic economic actors
While AI agents have evolved rapidly over the past couple of years, their capabilities remain constrained by gaps in reusable Skill assets, reliable payment infrastructure, and agent-to-agent collaboration. Pharos thus argues that enabling agents to operate as native onchain economic actors is the next logical step for the technology.
In short, Pharos seeks to allow agents to not simply answer questions but also hold assets, call tools, coordinate with other agents, and pay for their own actions. As such, the direction is a part of the company’s broader RealFi mission to bring real-world value usable onchain.
Pharos Network rebrands to support AI agentic economy
Notably, the upgrade is also accompanied by a new brand platform designed to help “Put Real-World Value to Work” and promote the platform as “Built for the Agentic Economy.”
“A brand refresh is not as simple as a new visual identity. It is about telling the story of what Pharos has been building: how RealFi brings real-world value onchain, how Agent Native changes the way people interact with that value, and how Pharos provides the infrastructure underneath,” Wish Wu, co-founder and CEO of Pharos Network, told Finbold in a press release.
This rebranding vision begins at the protocol level, with what the team calls Sponsored Transactions. One of the core capabilities introduced in the Testnet upgrade, this system separates the party initiating a transaction from the party paying its gas fees. As a result, applications or approved sponsors can cover transaction costs while preserving the original sender.
“We are not adding an AI feature to the application layer. We are giving agents — a new class of economic actors — the accounts, authorization and payments they need to operate. Today, those three lines came together for the first time,” Wu added.
What does the Pharos Network rebranding mean for users and developers?
The rebranding has an important implication for users. Specifically, it introduces a shift toward intent-based interaction. In other words, instead of navigating every step of an application manually, users can simply state what they want to accomplish.
At the same time, the Pharos Port Agent Widget, launching initially with Harbor, allows users to ask about their real-world asset positions, vault maturity, yield, and redemption windows. Naturally, the agent interprets the request and prepares the corresponding action autonomously, while the user still retains control over the execution itself.
For developers, the ai.pharos.xyz platform brings Pharos Chain MCP, Developer Docs MCP, and the official SkillEngine together through a single entry point. In parallel, the AnvitaMate x Pharos platform, developed in collaboration with AI agent infrastructure provider Anvita Flow, brings the same capabilities into a local AI environment.
Finally, Pharos has also unveiled its roadmap for the next phase of the Agent Native initiative. In Q4 2026, Proof-of-Stake (PoS) staking is planned to go live, while gas sponsorship is expected to enter Testnet.
In 2027, Agent Accounts, Agent Account transaction interfaces, and the State Economy are scheduled to progressively move toward deployment. Ultimately, by 2028, Pharos aims to support end-to-end Agent-Native workflows and bring all these capabilities together into an integrated stack.
Featured image via Shutterstock
