Behind the 3 billion-dollar valuation: Phantom growth anxiety and multi-chain bust

Original title: Web3 Super unicorn Phantom

Original by Zhou, Challenger

In 2025, the market for encrypted wallets is in a brutal race for shares。

as the currency boom subsided, high-frequency trading users began to move in large numbers to lower rates and more stimulating trading platforms. in the face of the eco-closure of the trading platform, the living space of independent players is being compressed。

Against this background, Phantom's performance raises concerns. At the beginning of the year, it pushed the valuation to $3 billion on a scale of $150 million in financing. Since the fourth quarter, the project has successively launched its own stabilization currency, CASH, a forecast market platform and encrypted debit cards in an attempt to find new growth points outside the trading operations。

3 billion in valuation, from Solana to multi-chain expansion

Looking back at the history of Phantom, in 2021 Solana's ecology just erupted and the chain infrastructure was not perfect. Traditional encrypted wallets, such as MetaMask, mainly support Etherfam, are not sufficiently compatible with other chains, and users experience a certain slab。

Usually, when creating a wallet, the user must manually copy 12 or 24 word seed phrases, which, if the key is lost, will never be able to recover the asset, which makes many potential users cumbersome and risky。

The three founders of Phantom, who had been working deep in 0x Labs (the DeFi Infrastructure Project) for many years, captured the opportunity and chose to enter from Solana to create a simple, intuitive wallet with an interface. Its core innovation is to optimize back-up processes by providing a variety of simple means, such as mailbox log-in, biometric recognition, encrypted cloud backup, and supporting the replacement of manual copying of seed phrases, which significantly lowers the threshold for new entry。

In April 2021, the Phantom Browser's extension came online, with millions of users in months, becoming the preferred user for Solana. According to RootData, in July of the same year, Phantom, who was still in the testing phase, obtained $9 million in round A for a16z; in January 2022, Paradigm awarded $109 million for round B, valued at $1.2 billion; and until early 2025, Paradigm and Redwood again received $150 million for their valuation, pushing it to $3 billion。

As the scale grew, Phantom then opened a multi-chain map to support multiple public chains, including Etheleum, Polygon, Bitcoin, Base, Sui, and tried to get rid of the label "Solana wallet". At present, however, Phantom does not have original support for BNB Chain, nor does Phantom support ETH, which led to the drop point。

The joys and worries of 2025

The year 2025 was a double day for Phantom: on the one hand it was a rapid breakthrough at the user and product levels, and on the other hand, the share of the trade was greatly eroded by the wallet of the trading platform。

Specifically, user growth is a bright side. Phantom's monthly active users increased from 15 million at the beginning of the year to nearly 20 million at the end of the year, and the rate of growth was high among independent wallets, especially in emerging markets such as India and Nigeria。

At the same time, Phantom ' s trust assets, which had exceeded $25 billion in size, had reached $44 million a week during peak periods, had once exceeded MetaMask ' s annual income and were now close to $570 million in cumulative income。

However, the concerns at the end of the transaction are equally prominent. According to Dune Analytics, Phantom ' s share in the web-based embedded swap market was close to 10 per cent at the beginning of the year, falling to 2.3 per cent in May and further shrinking to 0.5 per cent at the end of the year. The trading platform, which attracts a large number of high-frequency transactional users based on tariff advantages, new speeds and high air drop subsidies, currently accounts for nearly 70% of Binance Wallet, plus more than 20% of OKX。

The greater concern of the market for Phantom is still its deep binding on Solana. According to the data, 97 per cent of the swap transactions in Phantom occurred on Solana, while the total lock value of Solana (TVL) fell by more than 34 per cent from its peak of $13.22 billion on September 14, and is now at a six-month low point of $8.67 billion. This is a direct drag on the Phantom core trading indicators。

In the face of these pressures, Phantom put resources on new products in an attempt to create a second growth curve。

In product dimensions, Phantom introduced a series of differential features:

• Access to the Hyperliquid lasting contract in July, which drives up to about $1.8 billion in transactions in about 16 days, generating nearly $0.93 million in revenue through the return to domestic service mechanism

• In August, the coverage of the breakdown of transaction needs was further consolidated through the acquisition of the meme currency surveillance tool Solsniper and the NFT Data Platform SimpleHash。

• THE CASH, WHICH CAME ON LINE AT THE END OF SEPTEMBER, WITH A RAPID SUPPLY BREAKTHROUGH OF $100 MILLION AND A TRADING PEAK OF OVER 160,000 IN NOVEMBER, WHOSE CORE COMPETITIVENESS LIES IN A FEE-FREE P2P TRANSFER AND ACCOMPANYING LENDING INCENTIVES

• The Phantom Cash debit card, launched in the United States in December, to support users in using a chain-stabilized currency for direct card consumption, compatible with mainstream mobile payments such as Apple Pay and Google Pay

• The launch on 12 December of the forecasting market platform, which integrates the Kalshi forecast market within the wallet, is now open to eligible users

At the same time, free SDK "Phantom Conect" was introduced, allowing users to use the same account for seamless access to different web3 applications, further lowering the onboarding threshold for developers and users。

Of these, there is no greater concern than debit cards and CASH stabilization coins, through which Phantom attempts to solve the problem of the "last kilometre" of the consumption of encrypted assets。

As Phantom CEO Brandon Millman has publicly stated, short-term non-payment, no IPO, no chain-building, all energy is focused on sharpening products and making wallets a financial tool for ordinary people. In his view, the end of the wallet track was not who had the largest volume of transactions, but who first brought encryption into the daily payment。

However, the "last kilometre" route, paid for in encrypted currency, was not easy to follow, and Phantom was not the first independent non-trust wallet to introduce a debit card。

Before that, in 2025, MetaMask, in collaboration with MasterCard, Baanx and CompoSecure, had launched MetaMask Card to support real-time conversion of encrypted currencies for consumption in French and rollout in various parts of the European Union, the United Kingdom and Latin America. MetaMask's cards cover a wider range and start up earlier, but are limited to the Etheleum and Linea networks, which are more expensive and slow, and user feedback is "easy but less useful"。

By contrast, Phantom's debit card started late and is currently available only on a small scale in the United States, with actual usage to be observed. In theory, it may be more competitive in cost-sensitive emerging markets, depending on Solana’s low-cost advantage, but there is still a clear gap in global coverage and commercial acceptance compared to MetaMask Card。

With regard to the stabilization currency, CASH, if it does not produce a continuous network effect, may also enter the aftermath of other wallets, such as MetaMask’s original stabilization currency (MUSD), which quickly breaks over $100 million, but falls to about $25 million in less than two months。

Concluding remarks

as the meme tide recedes, trade volumes are no longer reliable moats, and independent wallets must return to the nature of financial services。

Overall, Phantom has integrated the trade end into the Hyperliquid contract and the Kalshi forecast market, retaining high-level users; bets on CASH stabilization coins and debit cards at the consumer end, trying to put chain assets into real daily life。

This two-track drive of tradable derivatives + consumption payments is Phantom's self-resortment under the chasm effect of the wallet, not only in the search for a second growth curve, but also in the definition of the end end of the independent wallet。

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