Phantom, a DeFi wallet app for the Solana ecosystem, has been showered with a lot of attention from both investors and developers alike. The San Francisco-based crypto startup has announced via Twitter of landing a fat $109 million funding exercise led by venture capital firm Paradigm on a $1.2 billion valuation. Others who participated in the round included a16z, Variant, Solana Ventures, and Jump Crypto.
The latest news comes after the startup secured a $9 million Series A from Andreessen Horowitz and has gained more than 2 million monthly active users in just six months after launch. Beginning with a humble 40k users, Phantom CEO Brandon Millman noted that the firm has been consistently bringing nearly 100k users per week.
In an interview with TechCrunch Millman stated,
“As the party that’s closest to the end-user, we definitely have a responsibility to protect and educate users. A lot of the work that we’ve spent in the past couple of months has been around user safety-related features.”
In addition to that, the Solana wallet app is also ramping up its presence on mobile, revealing the rollout of an iOS app alongside the latest development, and is slated to release an Android native app in the near future.
Phantom’s future Roadmap
For its next big goal, Phantom is seeking to explore beyond the Solana ecosystem and go multi-chain and add support for another blockchain to its wallet. Having said that, the startup did not specifically divulge where exactly it’s aiming to focus resources, at the time of this post.
However, it is certain that the premier wallet firm is looking to establish support for a blockchain compatible with Ethereum’s EVM stack where most crypto developers have been focusing their attention and where competitors such as MetaMask dominate.
The post further mentions the scope of Multi-chain compatibility which it claimed as expanded opportunities but also comes with the headaches of dealing with multiple ecosystems, which might pose a challenge for a firm like Phantom, that consists of some 20 odd staff at present although the team plans on onboarding more employees with its new funding.