The Hopes and Concerns Behind Web3 Super Unicorn Phantom

Author: zhou, ChainCatcher

The cryptocurrency wallet market in 2025 is witnessing a brutal battle for market share.

As the meme coin frenzy fades, high-frequency trading users are increasingly flocking to exchange wallets with lower fees and stronger incentives. In the face of the ecological closed loop of exchanges, the survival space for independent players is continuously being squeezed.

Against this backdrop, Phantom's performance has drawn attention. At the beginning of the year, it raised $150 million, pushing its valuation to $3 billion. Since the fourth quarter, the project has consecutively launched its own stablecoin CASH, a prediction market platform, and a crypto debit card, attempting to find new growth points beyond its trading business.

A valuation of 3 billion, starting from Solana and expanding across multiple chains.

Looking back at the development history of Phantom, in 2021, the Solana ecosystem had just emerged, and the on-chain infrastructure was not yet完善. Traditional crypto wallets like MetaMask mainly supported the Ethereum ecosystem, with insufficient compatibility for other chains, resulting in certain shortcomings in user experience.

When creating a wallet, users are usually required to manually write down a seed phrase of 12 or 24 words. If the key is lost, the assets will be permanently unrecoverable, which makes many potential users feel that it is cumbersome and high-risk.

The three founders of Phantom previously worked for many years at 0x Labs (an Ethereum DeFi infrastructure project). They seized this opportunity to enter from Solana and create a wallet with a simple interface and intuitive operation. Its core innovation lies in optimizing the backup process: offering various simple methods such as email login, biometric authentication, and encrypted cloud backup, which assist in replacing the manual transcription of seed phrases, significantly lowering the entry barrier for newcomers.

In April 2021, the Phantom browser extension was launched, and within months, the number of users surpassed one million, becoming the top choice for Solana users. According to data from RootData, in July of the same year, Phantom, still in its testing phase, secured $9 million in Series A funding led by a16z; in January 2022, Paradigm led a $109 million Series B round, reaching a valuation of $1.2 billion; by early 2025, Paradigm and Sequoia led another $150 million round, pushing its valuation to $3 billion.

As the scale expanded, Phantom subsequently opened up a multi-chain landscape, supporting multiple public chains including Ethereum, Polygon, Bitcoin, Base, and Sui, in an attempt to shake off the label of being a “Solana-only wallet.” However, Phantom still does not natively support BNB Chain, and previously, some users complained that Phantom supports ETH but not BNB Chain, leading to issues with airdrop eligibility.

The joys and sorrows of 2025

The year 2025 will be a tale of two extremes for Phantom: on one side, rapid breakthroughs in user and product levels, while on the other, a significant encroachment of trading volume share by exchange-associated wallets.

Specifically, user growth is a bright spot. Phantom's monthly active users grew from 15 million at the beginning of the year to nearly 20 million by the end of the year, ranking among the top in terms of growth rate among independent wallets, especially with significant user increases in emerging markets like India and Nigeria.

At the same time, Phantom's managed assets have exceeded 25 billion USD, with weekly earnings reaching 44 million USD at its peak, and annual revenue once surpassing MetaMask. Currently, Phantom's cumulative revenue is close to 570 million USD.

However, concerns regarding trading volume are equally prominent. According to data from Dune Analytics, Phantom's market share in the cross-network embedded swap market has decreased from nearly 10% at the beginning of the year to 2.3% in May, and further shrunk to only 0.5% by the end of the year. Meanwhile, exchange-related wallets, leveraging fee advantages, rapid new listings, and substantial airdrop subsidies, have attracted a large number of high-frequency trading users. Currently, Binance Wallet accounts for nearly 70%, while OKX (wallet + routing API) together exceeds 20%.

The market's greater concern for Phantom lies in its deep ties to Solana. Data shows that 97% of Phantom's swap transactions occur on Solana, while Solana's total locked value (TVL) has dropped over 34% from its peak of $13.22 billion on September 14, currently falling to a six-month low of $8.67 billion. This directly affects Phantom's core trading metrics.

Faced with these pressures, Phantom is betting its resources on new products in an attempt to create a second growth curve.

In terms of product dimensions, Phantom has launched a series of differentiated features:

• In July, the Hyperliquid perpetual contracts were integrated, achieving approximately $1.8 billion in trading volume in just about 16 days after launch, generating nearly $930,000 in revenue through the rebate mechanism (builder codes);
• In August, through the acquisition of the meme coin monitoring tool Solsniper and the NFT data platform SimpleHash, further solidifying the coverage of niche trading demand.
• The native stablecoin CASH, launched at the end of September, quickly surpassed a supply of 100 million USD, with transaction peaks exceeding 160,000 in November. Its core competitive advantage lies in fee-free P2P transfers and accompanying lending rewards;
• The Phantom Cash debit card, which debuted in the United States in December, allows users to spend on-chain stablecoins directly and is compatible with mainstream mobile payments such as Apple Pay and Google Pay;
• Announced the launch of the prediction market platform on December 12, integrating the Kalshi prediction market within the wallet, which is now open to eligible users;
• Launched the free SDK “Phantom Connect”, allowing users to seamlessly access different web3 applications with the same account, further lowering the onboarding threshold for developers and users.

Among them, the most attention-grabbing are the debit card and CASH stablecoin, as Phantom attempts to solve the “last mile” issue of cryptocurrency asset consumption through them.

Phantom CEO Brandon Millman has publicly stated that there will be no token issuance, IPO, or self-built blockchain in the short term. All efforts are focused on refining the product to make the wallet a financial tool that ordinary people can use. He believes that the ultimate goal in the wallet sector is not who has the largest trading volume, but who brings cryptocurrency into everyday payments first.

However, the “last mile” of cryptocurrency payments is not an easy path, and Phantom is not the first independent non-custodial wallet to launch a debit card.

Prior to this, MetaMask partnered with Mastercard, Baanx, and CompoSecure in Q2 2025 to launch the MetaMask Card, which supports real-time conversion of cryptocurrencies to fiat for consumption, and has rolled out in various regions including the EU, UK, and Latin America. The MetaMask card has broader coverage and launched earlier, but is limited to the Ethereum and Linea networks, with higher fees and slower speeds, leading users to feedback that it is “convenient but used infrequently.”

In contrast, Phantom's debit card started later and is currently only being rolled out in a small area in the United States, so its actual adoption remains to be seen. Theoretically, it relies on Solana's low fee advantage, which may be more competitive in fee-sensitive emerging markets, but in terms of global coverage and merchant acceptance, it still has a significant gap compared to the MetaMask Card.

In terms of stablecoins, if CASH cannot establish a sustained network effect, it may follow the footsteps of other wallet-native stablecoins that have experienced a “high opening and low closing” trend, such as MetaMask's native stablecoin mUSD, which saw its supply quickly surpass $100 million after launch, but fell to about $25 million in less than two months.

Conclusion

As the meme craze fades, trading volume is no longer a reliable moat, and independent wallets must return to the essence of financial services.

Overall, Phantom integrates Hyperliquid perpetual contracts and Kalshi prediction markets at the trading end to retain high-level users; on the consumer side, it bets on the CASH stablecoin and debit card, trying to bring on-chain assets into everyday life.

This dual-track drive of “trading derivatives + consumer payments” is Phantom's self-redemption under the squeeze of the Matthew effect in the wallet track. It is not only seeking a second growth curve but also defining the ultimate fate of independent wallets.