Solana-focused Wallet Phantom Hits 1.8M Users but Aims Much Higher for 2022

Solana-focused crypto wallet Phantom is looking to onboard a lot more users and is aiming to have more than 10 million weekly active users in 2022, Brandon Millman, co-founder and CEO of Phantom told Blockworks. 

“Somewhere in the 10 [million] to 50 [million] range is what we’re shooting for,” Millman said. “It’s really hard to say where exactly it’s going to land, especially because the macro crypto environment is such a huge factor as well,” he added. 

For reference, Phantom was undergoing beta testing in April 2021 and saw a 4,400% increase from 40,000 users in July to 1.8 million users in December. Phantom hit 1 million users in November and at the end of December, its weekly active user count reached about 1.8 million, Millman said.

In July, Phantom closed a $9 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z. Millman said there has been a lot of interest from investors since then, but there are no additional funding rounds to announce at this time. 

Shifting its mindset to support Solana users 

The three co-founders, Millman, CPO Chris Kalani and CTO Francesco Agosti all left their roles at 0x, an open protocol crypto infrastructure startup, to create Phantom in the Spring of 2021.

“We were quite deep in the Ethereum space and we really wanted to create a MetaMask competitor,” Millman said. “We had a lot of ideas on how to make the wallet part of Web3 better,” he added. 

The original goal was to create a multi-chain version of MetaMask with a focus on DeFi and NFTs, but as the Phantom team saw extreme growth, they’ve shifted their mindset to supporting Solana and making it the best option for Solana wallet users, Millman said. Wallet users can store, send, receive, stake and swap tokens on the Solana blockchain.

Additionally, non-fungible tokens saw exponential growth this year, which contributed to Phantom’s success because it allows wallet holders to trade and hold Solana-based NFTs, through NFT marketplaces like Solanart. Although Solanart is one of many NFT marketplaces that Phantom connects to, it has had 541,851 total sales with a total SOL volume of 4,532,922, which is about $797,794,272, according to its website. 

Despite enormous growth, the desktop browser-based crypto wallet has no plans to slow down. In addition to expanding to over 10 million users, the company is working on finishing up its mobile applications for iOS and Android, Blockworks previously reported. 

Phantom’s mobile application is currently in beta testing and although it doesn’t have an exact launch date yet, it is aiming for an iOS launch at the end of January or the first week of February, Milman said. Its Android application would follow shortly after. 

“The long-term vision is if someone wants to use a blockchain-based application, or dApp, their first instinct to be able to get access to the application should be to download Phantom,” Millman said. 

“Very similar to how, if you’re on a laptop, and you want to go to Twitter, your first instinct is to go on a browser. That’s the long-term goal and for that goal to be realized, we do need to be able to support different networks and different blockchains that people are using, so that’s the goal we’re moving toward,” he said.

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