With 22 million users, the crypto wallet provider and new Fintech 50 member, is coming for Coinbase and Robinhood, positioning itself as a full-scale consumer platform, akin to Apple’s iOS.
With 22 million users, the crypto wallet provider and new Fintech 50 member is coming for Coinbase and Robinhood , positioning itself as a full-scale consumer platform, akin to Apple’s iOS.Last January, the San Francisco-based developer of a crypto wallet that lets users buy, sell, swap and store thousands of tokens kicked the year off with a $150 million Series C round co-led by Sequoia Capital and Paradigm at a $3 billion valuation.
Over the following months, it added 3 million new users and now counts 22 million globally, while revenue grew 60% to $320 million, up from $200 million the previous year. Much of that growth came from new offerings aimed at turning Phantom from a run of the mill crypto wallet into the most-user friendly offering among the dozens that exist. Over the summer, the firm launched perpetual futures, derivative contracts that allow traders to speculate on asset prices without an expiration date, through an integration with Hyperliquid, the dominant trading venue for these wildly speculative securities. Perps already account for $31 billion of the trading volume done via Phantom and. In September, the startup unveiled Phantom Cash, a set of tools built with Stripe designed to make moving between fiat and crypto seamless, plus a Visa debit card. Then in December Phantom announced its users would have access to prediction markets that reference Kalshi’s data and a trading terminal aimed at more active, advanced traders. In short, Phantom is gunning to create a user-friendly jumping off point and ecosystem for digital asset usage, much the way Apple’s iPhone has done for the mobile apps. Phantom’s CEO, 34-year-old Brandon Millman, is not shy about his ambitions. “It is such a powerful place to be and the basis of creating a product that competes head on with Coinbase, Robinhood, Cash App, Revolut, etc.,” he says. “We are very well positioned to serve this super app kind of experience because of our relationship with the end user. The self-custodial experience the wallet provides is really the distribution point for this emerging on-chain DeFi world, and that makes it the perfect foundation for the next-generation global consumer platform.” Millman and his cofounders, Francesco Agosti and Chris Kalani, believed this even before starting Phantom. After stints at X , Yelp and Meta respectively, the trio spent 2018 through 2021 at crypto trading infrastructure firm 0x, building plumbing that powered billions of dollars in weekly volume, just as decentralized finance and its early applications such as Uniswap, Aave and Compound were taking off. “We understood that the wallet was a key, strategic part of this whole emerging Web3 stack, the first touch point for the end consumer, and it was actually the best place for us to leverage our skill set in consumer applications,” says Millman. The other part of his team’s thesis was that the world was going multi-chain, and wallets would start to resemble exchanges: a single front-end where users can move across blockchains without thinking about it. “Instead of competing head on with MetaMask , our strategy was to essentially create our own MetaMask for an up-and-coming ecosystem, which was Solana, and then use that as rocket fuel to attack the broader market,” Milman adds. Users of Phantom can now use the wallet as a one stop app for interacting with crypto not only on Solana, but also on Ethereum, Bitcoin, Coinbase’s Base and a few other blockchains. Betting on Solana proved to be a winning strategy as the network rode successive waves of consumer adoption—from the 2021 NFT boom to the 2024 memecoin frenzy and now the rise of perpetual futures. The Solana blockchain is similar to Ethereum, only it’s much faster at processing transactions . Phantom claims its growth has been organic, tied to the rise of Solana’s success, and only recently, flush with venture money, has it started paid marketing campaigns. User experience, of course, has also played a huge part. "Phantom has made managing crypto feel simple. Many crypto products are built for power users, not for consumers who just want a safe app that 'just works’. This focus on user experience and simple design has enabled Phantom to grow," says Arjun Balaji, investing and research partner at Paradigm, one of Phantom’s largest investors. To keep pace with its rapid expansion, Phantom nearly doubled its workforce in 2025, growing from less than a 100 employees to approximately 175. This hiring spree has set up Phantom for what Millman describes as its final evolution. The ultimate goal isn’t just to take on the fintech giants like Coinbase and Robinhood, but to reach true internet scale. “There are a lot of trends going for us,” says Millman. “Overall, the world is becoming more internet-native and digital. All those forces are working in the favor of crypto and an app that’s built on top of it that is global-first.”
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