Author:zhou, ChainCatcher
2025The cryptocurrency wallet market is witnessing a brutal battle for market share.
As the hype surrounding meme coin fades, high-frequency trading users are increasingly migrating to exchange-affiliated wallets with lower fees and stronger incentives. Faced with the closed ecosystem of exchanges, the survival space for independent players is being continuously squeezed.
As the hype surrounding meme coin fades, high-frequency trading users are beginning to migrate en masse to exchange-affiliated wallets with lower fees and stronger incentives. Against this backdrop, Phantom's performance has attracted attention. At the beginning of the year, it raised $150 million, pushing its valuation to $3 billion. Since the fourth quarter, the project has launched its own stablecoin, CASH, a prediction market platform, and a crypto debit card, attempting to find new growth points beyond its trading business.
3 billion valuation, from Solana's origins to multi-chain expansion
A review of Phantom's development history, 2021 The Solana ecosystem is still in its early stages, and its on-chain infrastructure is not yet fully developed. Traditional crypto wallets such as MetaMask primarily support the Ethereum ecosystem and lack compatibility with other chains, resulting in certain shortcomings in user experience. Typically, when creating a wallet, users must manually copy down a seed phrase of 12 or 24 words. Losing the key permanently renders the assets unrecoverable, which many potential users find tedious and risky. The three founders of Phantom had previously worked for many years at 0x Labs (an Ethereum DeFi infrastructure project). They seized this opportunity and chose to start with Solana, creating a wallet with a simple interface and intuitive operation. Its core innovation lies in optimizing the backup process: providing multiple simple methods such as email login, biometrics, and encrypted cloud backup to assist in replacing manual copying of seed phrases, greatly reducing the learning curve for beginners. In April 2021, the Phantom browser extension was launched, and within months, its user base exceeded one million, becoming the preferred choice for Solana users. According to RootData, in July of the same year, Phantom, still in its testing phase, received $9 million in funding led by a16z. leaf=""> A round of financing;2022 year 1 Month, Paradigm led investment 1.09 USD 1.0 billion B、BaseSui , are attempting to shed the label of "Dedicated Wallet for Solana". However, Phantom currently does not natively support BNB Chain. Previously, some users complained that Phantom supports ETH but not BNB Chain, causing difficulties in claiming airdrops. 2025: A Year of Joy and Sorrow For Phantom, 2025 was a year of contrasting fortunes: on one hand, rapid breakthroughs in user base and product development; on the other hand, significant erosion of its trading volume share by exchange-affiliated wallets. Specifically, user growth was a bright spot. Phantom's monthly active users grew from 15 million at the beginning of the year to nearly 20 million by the end of the year, ranking among the top growth rates among independent wallets, especially with significant user growth in emerging markets such as India and Nigeria. Meanwhile, Phantom's assets under management exceeded $25 billion, with peak weekly earnings reaching $44 million and annual revenue once surpassing MetaMask. Currently, Phantom... Cumulative revenue is close to $5.7 billion. However, concerns about transaction volume are equally prominent. According to data from Dune Analytics, Phantom's market share in the overall embedded swap market fell from nearly 10% at the beginning of the year to 2.3% in May, and further shrank to only [amount missing] by the end of the year. 0.5%. Exchange-affiliated wallets, with their advantageous fees, rapid new product launches, and substantial airdrop subsidies, have attracted a large number of high-frequency trading users. Currently, Binance Wallet accounts for nearly 70%, and OKX (wallet + routing API) together account for over 20%. The market's greater concern about Phantom lies in its deep integration with Solana. Data shows that 97% of Phantom swap transactions occurred on Solana, and the total locked value (TVL) of Solana was from […]. On September 14th, the value of $132.2 billion fell by more than 34%, and has now fallen to a six-month low of $86.7 billion. This directly dragged down Phantom's core trading metrics. Faced with these pressures, Phantom focused its resources on new products, attempting to create a second growth curve. In terms of product, Phantom has launched a series of differentiated features: In July, it integrated Hyperliquid perpetual contracts, and its deployment was limited to... In about 16 days, it drove approximately $1.8 billion in transaction volume, generating nearly $93 million in revenue through a rebate mechanism (builder codes); in August, it acquired meme. The inclusion of cryptocurrency monitoring tools, Solsniper, and NFT data platforms, including SimpleHash, further strengthens coverage of segmented transaction needs. The native stablecoin CASH, launched at the end of September, quickly surpassed $100 million in supply, with peak monthly transactions exceeding 110,000. Its core competitive advantage lies in its fee-free transaction service. P2P transfers and associated lending rewards; Phantom Cash debit card, launched in the US in December, supports users to make direct card payments using on-chain stablecoins and is compatible with mainstream mobile payment methods such as Apple Pay and Google Pay; On December 12th, [company name] announced the launch of its prediction market platform, integrating the Kalshi prediction market into its wallet, which is currently open to eligible users; [company name] also launched a free SDK, "Phantom Connect". This allows users to seamlessly access different web3 applications using the same account, further lowering the barrier to entry for developers and users. Among them, the most attention has been focused on debit cards and stablecoins, with Phantom attempting to solve the "last mile" problem of crypto asset consumption through them. Phantom CEO Brandon Millman has publicly stated that Phantom will not issue its own token, go public, or build its own blockchain in the short term. All its efforts will be focused on refining the product, making the wallet a financial tool that ordinary people can use. He believes that the ultimate winner in the wallet market will not be who has the largest transaction volume, but who is the first to bring crypto into everyday payments. However, the "last mile" of cryptocurrency payments is not easy, and Phantom is not the first independent, non-custodial wallet to launch a debit card.
Prior to this, MetaMask at 2025 Year Q2 has already signed an agreement with leaf="">、Baanx
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