Pharos Network took the keynote stage at Korea Blockchain Week in Seoul to announce a coordinated Agent Native upgrade spanning both its protocol and its ecosystem roadmap. The rollout combines sponsored transactions — already live on the Pharos Testnet — with new AI-powered entry points for users and developers. Kicking off today and running through Q4, the release schedule covers an Agent Native upgrade on the Pharos Testnet, the Pharos Port Agent Widget for natural-language RealFi interaction, the launch of the Pharos AI portal at ai.pharos.xyz, an AnvitaMate x Pharos collaboration, and a roadmap pointing toward an Agent-Native Chain.

The announcement situates itself within a wider industry shift. Over the past two years, AI agents have moved quickly from concept to offchain product, yet their onchain activity has remained constrained by the absence of reusable Skill assets, dependable payment rails, and reliable agent-to-agent coordination. The constraint is mechanical as much as conceptual: every onchain transaction must be signed with its account's key and paid for in gas, so software that cannot hold an account, obtain authorization, or cover fees cannot transact at all. Pharos frames agents not as interfaces that simply answer prompts, but as native economic participants — entities able to hold assets, invoke tools, coordinate with other agents, and pay for their own actions.

That architecture connects directly to Pharos' RealFi goal of making real-world value usable onchain RealFi supplies the assets and financial activity, while Agent Native is intended to make that value easier to access, interpret, and act upon. The upgrade also debuts a refreshed brand anchored to the mission of “Put Real-World Value to Work,” carried by the message “Built for the Agentic Economy” and an emphasis on enabling real value to be used by humans and agents alike.

Protocol Shift Separates Payment From Execution

At the protocol layer, the Testnet upgrade introduces Sponsored Transactions, which decouple the party initiating a transaction from the party paying gas. Applications or approved sponsors can cover transaction costs while the original sender remains preserved — a design intended to reduce friction without stripping away attribution or control. Fee delegation of this kind has become a familiar onboarding pattern across major networks, most often used to let new users transact without first acquiring a chain's native token; Pharos points the same mechanism at a second class of participants — automated agents that need to cover the cost of their own activity.

For users, interaction moves toward intent-based commands. Rather than stepping through every application screen manually, users can state the outcome they want. The Pharos Port Agent Widget, rolling out first with Harbor, is designed to field questions about real-world asset positions, vault maturity, yield, and redemption windows. The agent interprets request and prepares the corresponding action, with the user retaining control throughout.

For developers, ai.pharos.xyz brings Pharos Chain MCP, Developer Docs MCP, and the official SkillEngine together behind one entry point. MCP refers to the Model Context Protocol, an open standard for connecting AI models to external tools and data sources. A parallel release, AnvitaMate x Pharos, from AI agent infrastructure provider Anvita Flow, packages the same capabilities into a local AI environment so builders can develop on Pharos without leaving their own workspace.

Pharos also outlined its next deployment phase. PoS staking is expected to go live in Q4 2026, while gas sponsorship is planned to enter Testnet. In 2027, Agent Accounts, agent account transaction interfaces, and State Economy are scheduled to move progressively into deployment, with end-to-end Agent-Native workflows targeted by 2028. Taken together with the Q4 items — the Testnet upgrade, the Harbor-first widget rollout, the ai.pharos.xyz portal, and the AnvitaMate integration — the schedule gives clear checkpoints to watch, though the announcement stopped short of naming a Mainnet date for the Agent-Native Chain itself.

“A brand refresh is not as simple as a new visual identity,” said Wish Wu, co-founder and CEO of Pharos Network, in a written statement. “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. 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,” he added.

Source: Metaverse Post