A crypto wallet from the Solana ecosystem, Phantom, has announced that it has closed a $109 million Series B funding round, and is ready to launch the app for iOS devices.
Estimates are that Phantom is now a unicorn: the startup is valued at $1.2 billion.
Summary
Phantom, Solana’s crypto wallet
Yesterday, Phantom, one of Web3’s leading crypto wallets to access the Solana ecosystem, announced the closing of its $109 million Series B funding round.
We are also excited to announce our $109M Series B led by @paradigm! Thanks to the 2M+ MAU in our community, Phantom has an opportunity to become the mainstream, user-friendly gateway to Web3. https://t.co/J0RyouBIo3
— Phantom (@phantom) January 31, 2022
“We are also excited to announce our $109M Series B led by @paradigm! Thanks to the 2M+ MAU in our community, Phantom has an opportunity to become the mainstream, user-friendly gateway to Web3”.
The current funding round was led by Paradigm with participation from investors including a16z, Variant, Solana Ventures and Jump Crypto.
Not only that, the monstrous unicorn round lets Phantom be valued at $1.2 billion today, while six months ago the startup had closed a $9 million Series A funding round from Andreessen Horowitz.
At the time, the startup had 40,000 active users, now it has 2.1 million, with CEO Brandon Millman noting that the company has been consistently onboarding about 100,000 users per week
Phantom’s next big ambition is to go multi-chain and add support for another blockchain beyond the Solana ecosystem to its portfolio. At the moment, it has not been revealed which blockchain this will be, but it will certainly be one compatible with Ethereum Virtual Machine (or EVM) so as to compete with rivals like MetaMask.
Phantom, the app launch on iOS devices
Just a few hours ago, Phantom shared the announcement of the app’s launch on iOS on Twitter:
Phantom for iPhone is finally here! Everything you can do on desktop, now in your pocket. The power of Phantom and @solana everywhere you go!
Get it now 👉 https://t.co/udlZGRpsz5 pic.twitter.com/UwOsSbMm8n
— Phantom (@phantom) January 31, 2022
“Phantom for iPhone is finally here! Everything you can do on desktop, now in your pocket. The power of Phantom and Solana everywhere you go! Get it now”.
While the launch of the app on Android will be available soon, iPhone users will already be able to use the crypto wallet and all its features from their smartphones.
Phantom claims that in its desktop version, users have staked over 112.4 million SOL ($10.4 billion), traded $1.37 billion in tokens and performed 55.2 million NFT, DeFi and app transactions.
Solana (SOL) and its growth
In 2021, Solana’s blockchain has seen a considerable surge, becoming one of the main competitors for Ethereum.
In this regard, Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou, managing director of the investment bank JP Morgan, would have said that in the NFT sector Solana represents a real threat to the smart contract blockchain par excellence.
Not only that, even in the DeFi sector, Solana’s Total Locked Value (TVL) in the past year has grown by $660 million and spans 40 decentralized applications.
This has led Nigel Green, CEO and founder of deVere Group, to claim that Solana in 2022 could surpass Ethereum and Bitcoin. A bit of a wild guess perhaps, but looking at 2021, while Bitcoin grew 62%, Ethereum about 250%, Solana would have a growth of almost 13,000%.
At the time of writing, SOL is in the seventh position with a total market cap of over $33 billion and a dominance of 1.89%. SOL’s price has had a pump of over 15% in the last 24 hours, aligning with general cryptocurrency price rises, and is now worth $105.
