The winners and losers of Phantom’s Hyperliquid integration

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Phantom wallet announced yesterday that it was integrating Hyperliquid perps right into its wallet interface.

This is surprising, mainly because Phantom is Solana’s marquee wallet and far ahead of competing wallets like Solflare or Backpack, with 15 million monthly active users (MAUs).

If Phantom wanted a cut of the perps market, I suppose one would’ve naively expected it to partner up first with a native Solana perps DEX like Drift or Jupiter.

But though Drift or Jupiter might be hometown favorites, Hyperliquid is where the money already is.

Source: Dune

So the wallet that onboarded millions to Solana is now shepherding flow to a rival venue, which doesn’t boost Solana fees or TVL at all.

Just this morning, Kraken and Backed announced that xStocks would also be launching on BNB Chain.

Soon, eligible Kraken customers will be able to deposit and withdraw those BEP-20 stock tokens straight from the exchange.

xStocks is Kraken and Backed’s tokenized stock product that debuted on Solana less than two weeks ago (I wrote about it last week).

Tokenized stocks may have been Solana-first, but they will be fiercely multichain. Bybit is also integrating xStocks.

xStocks’ move to BNB Chain is no surprise, given Backed co-founder Adam Levi’s stated goal for the product to “be a neutral, public good asset class” and eventually “expanding xStocks to other exchanges and chains.”

What investor mental model do these pieces of news affirm?

The Phantom x Hyperliquid news seems to simultaneously affirm both the Fat Wallet thesis and Fat App thesis.

Build a great wallet like Phantom, because wallets, not apps, own the users.

Or build a great app like Hyperliquid, because users follow the app, not the underlying chain.

But if you can, you should most definitely build a Fat Exchange like Robinhood or Kraken, because then you can take your users to whichever chain you want.

Kraken is a Fat Exchange, but it’s not quite as Fat as Robinhood’s 14 million MAUs. 

That may explain Kraken’s decision to go multichain fast and cement its position on each respective blockchain.

There was never really a reason to believe that wallets, apps or CEXs would be loyal to any particular chain to begin with.

Time to totally disabuse that notion.

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