The company building Solana's top crypto wallet is now worth €1.2 billion, Phantom announced on Monday.
Venture capital firm Paradigm led a €109 investment in Phantom, CEO Brandon Millman said. It wasn't immediately clear who else joined Caps' table, or what percentage share they took in the upstart, whose main product is a Chromium browser plugin.
The wallet is also going mobile: On Monday, the company launched its iOS app. Millman expects his team of more than 20 people to ship an Android offering later this year, continuing the mission of putting Solana's most widely used crypto wallet into people's pockets.
Phantom's hyper-popular non-custodial service has become near-essential infrastructure for Solana-based decentralized finance; Millman claimed to have "at least 90%" of the market share. (CoinDesk could not independently verify this figure.)
He managed to do it in an unorthodox way. In an industry marked by open source philosophies, Phantom, a private company, keeps the wallet code secret. Although the wallets of its competitors leave their doors open, Phantom's remain closed.
Millman said Phantom "certainly has aspirations" to go open source, but "it's been hard to prioritize." This is not yet the case due to a combination of operational, practical and competitive considerations, he said. Once this "Pandora's box" is opened, it will be impossible to go back.
"Once it's open source, there's this implicit expectation to respond to people who leave issues on the GitHub repository, people who submit pull requests and want to get features into the wallet," he said. "We don't want to start doing these things yet."
Plus, he said, the 2 million monthly active users don't seem too bothered by Phantom's closed source code.
But the influential forces in Solana are chafing. An analyst at a major venture capital firm said she kept using the Phantom only because there was no better option. He has vowed to abandon Phantom as soon as a "decent" open source alternative arrives.
Phantom for iPhone is finally here! Everything you can do on the desktop, now in your pocket. The power of Phantom and @solana wherever you go!
Get it now 👉 https://t.co/udlZGRpsz5 pic.twitter.com/UwOsSbMm8n
Being "better than" is precisely how Phantom grew his unicorn horn. Millman and his Ethereum-native co-founders built Phantom to be better than MetaMask, the popular wallet owned by ConsenSys.
This plan changed when Phantom moved to Solana, where MetaMask, an EVM-enabled wallet, is down. But sentiment remained a driving force behind Phantom's development.
“We were originally trying to move into this multi-channel division last year, but we chose to double down on Solana because of all the growth we were seeing,” Millman said, noting that “we are carefully considering the move to the EVM ecosystem in some ways this year.
Millman said Series B investors have bought into Phantom's multi-chain ambitions. They also signed before the crypto market crashed in 2022.
Phantom already has the cash on hand and plans to go on a hiring spree as his portfolio ambitions grow. Millman, who was an Ethereum developer for years before getting rusty, said he knows what it's like to code in a bear market. Having a cash reserve certainly helps.
"We just want to secure the money to make sure we're also protected in the event of a recession," he said.