Phantom, a Solana-based crypto wallet, announced a Series B funding round on July 26th which netted the project $109 million from leading venture capital firms.
Paradigm Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Solana Ventures, and Jump Crypto were some of the investors in the round.
The Jan 31 announcement stated that the wallet would only be available for Apple iOS users initially. The Android version would be “coming shortly.”
You can already download the wallet as an add-on to popular browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Brave, and Edge. This sets it up in direct competition with Ethereum wallet MetaMask which has already topped 21 million users last year.
A report from November claimed that Phantom is now at one million users. This figure has now doubled. The wallet is consistently onboarding about 100,000 users per week according to CEO Brandon Millman.
Solana is building the world’s leading crypto wallet, and the company has a market cap of $1.2 billion, according to the Monday announcement.
Creating Web3 Wallets
Phantom is looking to expand beyond Solana and into other networks for a full multi-chain environment. It’s specifically targeting Ethereum Virtual Machine compatible networks so that it can compete with MetaMask.
Millman said that the crypto ecosystem is not really for consumers yet, but the company hopes to bridge that gap.
“As the party that’s closest to the end user, we definitely have a responsibility to protect and educate users. A lot of the work that we’ve spent in the past couple months has been around user safety-related features.”
The company plans to expand the team beyond its current 20 employees and onboard more users to the world of Web3 finance.
The report showed that 112.4 million SOL tokens were used in exchange for over $1.37 billion in cryptocurrency transactions, and 55 million NFT, DeFi, and dApp transactions.
Featured photo source unsplash.com
