Wishlonger is the Co-Founder and CTO of Pharos Network, where he leads the development of its decentralized protocol stack and drives key industry partnerships. Formerly CSO at ZAN, Ant Group’s Web3 arm, he specialized in security architecture and vulnerability management. With a research background from Microsoft Research Asia and advanced degrees from USC and Virginia Tech, Wish brings deep expertise in distributed systems and network security to Pharos’s mission of building scalable, cross-chain infrastructure for real-world assets.
At Token2049, one of the year’s premier Web3 events, we sat down with Wishlonger, the CEO and Co-Founder of Pharos. He leads a layer-one blockchain project designed to provide high-performance open finance infrastructure and liquidity for DeFi and Real-World Assets (RWAs).
Drawing from his extensive experience developing consortium blockchains at Ant, Wishlonger has led large-scale blockchain and web2 projects for governments and major institutions, including pressure-testing systems with over a billion users. This background in institutional-grade payment networks and high-throughput applications directly informs the architecture of Pharos, which aims to bring TradFi-level performance and reliability to Web3.
How do you see infrastructure design evolving to support the next wave of DeFi and Web3 adoption?
The most fundamental aspect is high performance. In traditional finance, transaction speeds are much faster than on most blockchains. Our experience comes from building consortium blockchains for Web2 projects and institutions, including supporting the largest NFT platform in China, which processed transactions for over a billion people during the Chinese New Year.
That pressure test taught us that institutions need very high performance, low latency, finality, and high throughput, especially for payment networks. That’s why we built Pharos as a high-performance blockchain with real-time finality to support these scenarios. As a benchmark, Visa’s network peaks at 90k transactions per second (TPS), and we are aiming for 50k TPS, which we believe is sufficient to support institutional applications, RWAs, and future payment networks.
Decentralization always sounds great until scalability enters the room, so where does Pharos draw the line between performance and decentralization?
There is indeed a trade-off, known as the blockchain trilemma, between decentralization, performance, and security. While you can’t achieve a perfect balance in all three, we leverage technology to optimize the network as much as possible. We draw the line by using a validator set of about a few hundred nodes. Although it’s not millions of nodes like on Ethereum, we believe it is still sufficiently decentralized.
