The company building Solanaโs top crypto wallet is now worth $1.2 billion, Phantom announced Monday.
Crypto venture firm Paradigm led a $109 investment in Phantom, CEO Brandon Millman said. It was not immediately clear who else joined the cap table, or what percentage equity they took in the upstart firm, whose main product is a Chromium browser plugin.
The wallet is going mobile, too: On Monday, the company debuted its iOS app. Millman expects his 20-odd team to ship an Android offering later this year, following through on a mission to get Solanaโs most widely-used crypto wallet in peopleโs pockets.
Phantomโs hyper-popular non-custodial service has become almost critical infrastructure for Solana-based decentralized finance; Millman claimed to command โat least 90%โ market share. (CoinDesk could not independently verify this figure.)
Itโs managed to do so in a rather unorthodox way. In an industry marked by open-source philosophies, Phantom, a private company, keeps wallet code under wraps. Even as its competitor wallets let their doors swing open, Phantomโs remain shut.
Read more: Coinbase Close to Listing Solana Ecosystem Tokens: Sources
Millman said Phantom โdefinitely has aspirationsโ to go open-source but โit has been difficult to prioritize.โ It hasnโt yet due to a mix of operational, practical and competitive considerations, he said. Once that โpandoraโs boxโ is open it will be impossible to go back.
โOnce it’s open-source, thereโs this implicit expectation around responding to people who are leaving issues on the GitHub repo, people who are submitting pull requests, wanting to get features into the wallet,โ he said. โWe donโt want to start doing those things quite yet.โ
Plus, he said, the 2 million monthly active users donโt seem overly bothered by Phantomโs closed-source code.
But influential forces in Solana are irked. One analyst at a prominent venture capital firm said he continues to use Phantom only because thereโs no better option. He pledged to abandon Phantom as soon as a โdecentโ open-source alternate comes along.
Phantom for iPhone is finally here! Everything you can do on desktop, now in your pocket. The power of Phantom and @solana everywhere you go!
Get it now ๐ https://t.co/udlZGRpsz5 pic.twitter.com/UwOsSbMm8n
— Phantom (@phantom) January 31, 2022
Being โbetter thanโ is precisely how Phantom grew its unicorn horn. Millman and his Ethereum-native co-founders built Phantom to be better than MetaMask, the popular wallet owned by ConsenSys.
That plan shifted when Phantom settled on Solana, where MetaMask, an EVM-compatible wallet, does not play. But the sentiment remained a driving force behind Phantomโs development.
โWe originally were trying to move toward that multi-chain division last year, but chose to double down on Solana because of all the growth that we were seeing, โ Millman said, noting โweโre carefully considering the move to the EVM ecosystem sort of this year.โ
Read more: Solana Wallet Phantom Nixes Auction for iOS Beta Invites After Community Erupts
Millman said Series B investors bought into Phantomโs multi-chain ambitions. They also signed on before the crypto marketโs 2022 dip.
Phantom already has the cash in hand and plans to go on a hiring spree as its wallet ambitions grow. Millman, who was an Ethereum developer for years before he got rusty, said he knew what itโs like to code through a bear market. Having a cash stash certainly helps.
โWe just want to lock in the money to make sure that we were protected in a downturn as well,โ he said.
