Author: Deep Tide TechFlow

The long-sluggish Crypto has welcomed another billion-dollar valuation project, but this time the biggest highlight is not the valuation itself.

On March 14, 2026, Pharos, an institution-grade high-performance parallel Layer 1 public chain built for real finance, announced a comprehensive capital cooperation upgrade with Hong Kong Stock Exchange listed company GCL-Poly Energy (0451.HK), quickly becoming the market focus.

The market was first attracted by the valuation: According to the latest agreement signed by both parties, GCL-Poly Energy will complete its investment subscription to Pharos at a near billion-dollar valuation. One billion dollars is itself enough to ignite community discussion enthusiasm.

But immediately, everyone discovered something more interesting than the valuation:

According to disclosed documents, this investment subscription is not a simple "sign and effective" one-time investment, but comes with multiple prerequisites and staggered delivery terms. If any key condition fails, the cooperation will instantly become worthless.

In simple terms, signing a partnership does not equal the money actually arriving; everything depends on the market performance of Pharos Token.

These factors made this investment subscription appear less like Crypto and more like a capital duel between traditional markets and Crypto: both sides aim for a win-win cooperation while protecting their interests with prerequisites.

What should we expect from the subsequent market when Crypto financing, which has been accustomed to "unconditional money transfer," begins to be pulled to the table by traditional capital?

New Play in Crypto Financing: Coin-Stock Binding, Staggered Unlocking

Many people compare this investment subscription to a Crypto version of "betting," as it captures the risk control logic within the betting mechanism very well.

In traditional capital markets, betting is the most effective risk control tool for investors: funders provide high valuations, and entrepreneurs commit to performance guarantees. If KPIs are met in the future, everyone is happy; but if things go wrong, founders need to buy back shares from their own pockets.

Traditional investment banks often focus on future revenue and profit, while Crypto pays attention to a uniquely Web3 indicator: token listing performance.

However, if you only focus on the betting concept, you may easily overlook the model innovation led by this transaction.

Representing traditional capital stocks, and symbolizing Crypto capital coins, how to better integrate has been demonstrated by Pharos and GCL-Poly Energy: a sophisticated new capital model that binds mutual investments, synchronously takes effect, and unlocks in batches.

The first step in this structural innovation is Pharos's pre-subscription for shares in GCL-Poly Energy.

Pharos will act as the front-line investor, subscribing to new shares of GCL-Poly Energy at a price of HKD 1.05 per share, with a maximum subscription amount of 183,480,000 shares (equivalent to about 10% of GCL-Poly Energy's shares). Compared to GCL-Poly Energy's share price of around HKD 1.23, this subscription essentially offers a discount of about 15% to Pharos.

But at the capital table, there are never free chips.

To actually pocket this discounted share, Pharos must meet GCL-Poly Energy's "five-step" delivery conditions within an effective period of 18 months, with each step closely monitoring the future market performance of Pharos Token.

Once Pharos Token meets the delivery conditions, Pharos's share subscription in GCL-Poly Energy will accordingly take effect, while GCL-Poly Energy's subscription for Pharos Token will also take effect, with unlocking ratios consistent.

Under this bilateral binding:

• If Pharos Token performs up to standard, shares and coins are delivered together;
• If Pharos Token performs below expectations, shares and coins halt together.

Taking the crucial first batch as an example, once Pharos Token is successfully listed and meets opening standards, Pharos will immediately deliver 50% of the share subscription to GCL-Poly Energy, while GCL-Poly Energy will purchase Pharos Token valued at approximately HKD 96.73 million at a valuation of USD 950 million.

With such an investment subscription agreement, and in conjunction with previously announced services from Anchorage Digital for regulated minting, distribution, and custody for Pharos TGE, Pharos may already be in the countdown phase to TGE.

Mutual Needs: One Agreement, Two Winning Approaches

This special investment subscription transaction happens at a particularly delicate moment.

Too many past experiences tell us that the old financing logic of Crypto, which tells stories through white papers and supports valuations with liquidity imagination, has failed; the market has seen too many bubbles and collapses, what we need now is a vivid demonstration that encompasses real assets, compliant frameworks, and on-chain imagination.

The transaction between Pharos and GCL-Poly Energy fits this demonstration perfectly.

Behind the complex terms lies a competitive game of interests, where both parties try to lock their most important assets into the contract:

For GCL-Poly Energy, this is an excellent model that is both offensively and defensively advantageous.

Investing in Pharos is actively betting on an on-chain narrative, while introducing a betting format helps to manage risks well; if Pharos performs poorly, GCL can withdraw in a timely manner, but if Pharos performs excellently, not only will GCL gain real funding injection, but it will also acquire highly valuable Tokens at initial valuations.

For Pharos, the value of this transaction goes far beyond simply adding a partner.

The first harvest is trust endorsement. A Hong Kong-listed company willing to tie stocks and tokens together is itself the most weighty public acknowledgment for Pharos.

The second harvest is confidence proof. Pharos's ability to agree to this series of stringent delivery terms significantly conveys the project's confidence in future development to the market. This stance is more persuasive than any technical white paper.

The third harvest is a historical position as an "industry pioneer." Over the past year, we have seen too many DAT model cases of traditional listed companies purchasing crypto assets. This time, the direction has reversed: Pharos directly joins the shareholder ranks of GCL-Poly Energy through this subscription, becoming the first Crypto project to strategically hold shares in a traditional Hong Kong-listed company.

In many ways, this represents the first time a quality Crypto project from the crypto world has gained a real negotiating position and pricing power in traditional capital markets. Meanwhile, this transaction has also received announcement support from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, showcasing Hong Kong's foresight in embracing compliant Crypto innovation and injecting strong compliance background into this transaction.

One contract, two winning approaches.

In striving for a win-win situation and rejecting a lose-lose outcome, it also makes more people curious about the two main characters leading this model innovation.

It’s important to know that Hong Kong-listed companies have always had strict risk controls and conservative practices. Why did Pharos dare to write future price performance into the contract, and why did GCL-Poly Energy dare to bind listed company shares with a Token that has not yet completed market validation?

A closer understanding reveals that this seemingly bold cross-industry marriage hides an inevitability of mutual striving.

Mirror Complementarity: The Inevitable Meeting of Pharos and GCL-Poly

On one end of the table in this model innovation is GCL-Poly Energy.

As the leading photovoltaic enterprise in Asia, its core business focuses on the development, construction, operation, and management of solar power plants (photovoltaic power plants), as well as power sales and related solar services. While holding top-quality green assets, it also suffers from many traditional asset problems: long construction cycles, slow return on investment, and increasingly competitive financing.

What GCL-Poly really needs is not just another power station, but a financial tool that can reorganize, circulate, and re-evaluate these off-chain assets.

On the other end of the table is Pharos.

As a parallel L1 dedicated to institutional-grade scenarios, Pharos was clear from the outset that it wasn't about creating a higher-performing public chain, but about accommodating more real-world elements, including stablecoin settlement, institutional-grade DeFi, regulatory-friendly payment networks, and the on-chain circulation of RWAs, particularly in energy, commodities, and infrastructure assets. In simple terms, Pharos aims to become the infrastructure that can truly support the real financial narrative.

Performance is the premise that supports the vision of "RealFi Infrastructure." Pharos is designed based on modular + deep parallel execution engine, boasting sub-second confirmation, high throughput, and low fees, which better supports asset on-chain, circulation, and real-time settlement.

When facing compliance issues that institutions are highly concerned about when onboarding to the chain, Pharos's protocol layer incorporates ZK-KYC / AML and digital identity, supporting regulatory friendliness while maintaining openness.

Prior to collaborating with GCL-Poly Energy, Pharos had already gained favor from capital and institutions:

According to public data, Pharos completed two financing rounds in November 2024 and September 2025, gaining support from recognized VCs such as Hack VC and Lightspeed Faction.

In terms of institutional cooperation, Pharos previously announced a collaboration with decentralized finance platform Centrifuge, aiming to combine Centrifuge's institutional-level tokenization infrastructure and asset standards with Pharos's "inclusive and execution-first" Layer 1, further realizing large-scale distribution and operation of institutional-level assets on the chain, including tokenized U.S. Treasuries (JTRSY) and AAA-rated structured credit products (JAAA).

When placing the two parties together, we find a mirror-like complementarity between GCL-Poly Energy and Pharos.

For GCL-Poly Energy, it seeks a Crypto carrier that can open up Web3, RWAs, and market re-evaluation space, transforming offline heavy assets into new capital forms on-chain;

For Pharos, it requires a traditional capital entry that can accommodate high valuations, compliance narratives, and real asset imagination, bringing on-chain stories to real assets.

From this perspective, rather than merely a cooperation, this investment subscription is more like a meeting that was bound to happen. Interestingly,

As early as December 2024, GCL-Poly Energy collaborated with Ant Group to complete the domestic first deal of over RMB 200 million in photovoltaic green asset RWAs. In June 2025, the two formed a joint venture, "Ant Xinneng," to further explore scenarios such as energy AI + RWAs.

Meanwhile, we know that Pharos co-founders and several members come from Ant Group, and that Ant Group’s Ant Chain has substantial experience in the enterprise-level blockchain field, which may further enhance Pharos's technical implementation capabilities and institutional resource integration capabilities when addressing institutional-level RWA needs, indirectly laying the groundwork for this collaboration between Pharos and GCL-Poly.

However, if one only interprets this transaction as a capital binding, it may underestimate its significance. Once the cooperation is signed, the subsequent cooperation structure, asset on-chain pathways, and more innovative collaboration directions will tell a bigger story.

According to the types of on-chain locked assets published by Pharos, we can see that among all locked assets, 51% come from distributed photovoltaic operators and centralized power plant operators' new energy assets; 49% come from financial assets of fund management companies and credit asset issuers.

This largely indicates that the photovoltaic and new energy power station assets held by GCL-Poly are likely to be on the chain through Pharos in the future.

This means that high-quality green energy assets represented by GCL-Poly Energy in Asia will be able to break geographical limitations and connect more efficiently with the global market on-chain, while Pharos will also strive to bring high-quality RWA assets from Europe and America into Asia, enhancing Asian investors' global asset allocation capability.

Whether pushing out or bringing in, this binding model based on equity, tokens, and asset synergy may unleash growth momentum far exceeding the subscription itself.

Conclusion

Of course, everything is still in very early stages.

Amidst the current high uncertainty about the future, it is completely normal to have concerns and doubts.

Some community members believe that, according to the disclosed documents, Pharos's near billion-dollar valuation is derived from the current total locked asset value of Pharos, which is estimated at USD 250 million, and that this data has been disclosed unilaterally by the project party, lacking real market backing.

Others worry that the staggered delivery model based on conditions may cause excessive pressure on the secondary market for Pharos Token. Currently, before the mainnet goes live and the token is released, we can consider this as a confidence bet, but we cannot determine if this will turn into an early overdraft of confidence in the future.

However, the differing opinions precisely illustrate the community's attention to the event's subsequent developments, and these do not hinder our view of the model innovation seen through this coin-stock cooperation:

In the past, Crypto financing was more accustomed to getting money with a good story first and then proving itself with that money;

But now, the collaboration between Pharos and GCL-Poly Energy sends a strong signal through leading innovation: the next Crypto may be about who dares to incorporate their stories into contracts, entrust narratives to the market, and make promises become a must-fulfill reality.

In the era of bubbles, the most valuable is imagination; in the era of re-evaluation, the most valuable is fulfillability.

And this may be the true value that this investment subscription brings to the industry.