Pharos unveils native AI agent integration, turning plain English prompts to autonomous payments

Pharos, the value discovery layer for agentic economies built by former Ant Group senior executives and core engineers, is rolling out new native AI agent capabilities in the latest blockchain upgrades the project announced at its Korea Blockchain Week keynote today.

The “Agent Native” upgrades teased by the Hong Kong-based financial Layer 1 presented the solution that now allows users to give plain English language instructions to AI agents that can hold assets and pay for tools without waiting for manual approvals for each step of their workflow. 

What is in Pharos’ agent-native upgrade? 

The big protocol change from Pharos’s agent-native blockchain upgrade is the sponsored transaction that is arriving on Testnet. 

The logic that Pharos is implementing directly into its chain was also described by TRM Labs in its September analysis of x402. Senders only need to sign or authorize an action, and an application or approved sponsor will pay the gas.

The plain language prompting upgrade that Pharos also introduced comes from the Harbor app, which is a part of the Pharos Port Agent Widget. It is the upgrade that now allows users to ask their agents about their real-world asset positions, vault maturity, yield and redemption windows, with natural English prompts. 

ai.pharos.xyz put the Pharos Chain MCP, the Developer Docs MCP and the official SkillEngine together in one place, while AnvitaMate packages the same tools into a local AI environment.  

Pharos has an early-mover advantage in the agentic economy 

According to TRM, the rails for x402 transactions already work. TRM counted a total of $52.7 million in x402 volume settled across 198.9 million transactions since May 2025. Crossing out self-payments, bulk flows and thin-buyer sellers, AI agents account for between 0.6% and 7.5% of the remaining volume. 

The attribution and compliance tooling gap is what Pharos is moving to fill using the ZK-KYC and compliance-first design of its network. 

However, the numbers attributed to Pharos so far have come from testnet transactions and incentive campaigns. The chain’s Atlantic testnet reportedly processed about 4.3 billion transactions across 209 million wallets.

AI integrations are planned through 2028

The latest upgrades push Pharos closer to becoming a network that allows agents to earn and spend, building on top of the June deal that made PROS and USDC the exclusive crypto payment options on a ZAN-powered model-access platform with built-in x402 support. 99.6% of the transactions monitored by TRM were settled in USDC.

“We are not adding an AI feature to the application layer,” CEO Wish Wu said, describing the goal as giving agents the accounts, authorization and payments they need. 

The project also shared the roadmap of how it plans to continue to build toward a future where agentic payments become commonplace:

• Q4 2026: PoS staking goes live, and gas sponsorship is planned for Testnet.
• 2027: Agent Accounts, agent account transaction interfaces and the “State Economy” begin rolling out.
• 2028: End-to-end Agent-Native workflows on an integrated stack.