Paradigm invests in Solana wallet app Phantom at $1.2 billion valuation. The Solana wireless wallet is one of the most secure and user-friendly wallets available. It’s a simple process to create an account, fund it with cash, or use Ether as collateral in order to keep your funds safe. The Solana wireless wallet offers you complete control over your money while being universally accessible for everyone.
On a $1.2 billion valuation, the San Francisco cryptocurrency firm is raising a staggering $109 million funding round led by Paradigm that will use Solana’s attention to generate profits. Six months after raising a $9 million Series A from Andreessen Horowitz, the company announced it was closing another huge round at a valuation of over $1 billion. At the time, my company was small, with a little over 40,000 users. Now we have 2.1 million active users, with Brandon Millman claiming that the firm is onboarding about 100,000 people every week.
Solana wallet app Phantom grows with Paradigm
Phantom‘s next major goal is to expand across multiple chains and add support for additional blockchains to its wallet. The company isn’t saying where it plans to put its efforts, except that it wants to enable a blockchain with the EVM stack utilized by most bitcoin developers, where competitors like MetaMask lurk large.
Phantom is a one-stop shop that has already integrated with multiple networks, which should give it significant advantages over its rivals in the market. However, dealing with the hassles of many ecosystems may be difficult for Phantom, which presently employs around 20 people — though the team intends to expand as a result of this new investment.
“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 months has been around user safety-related features.”
-Millman
Phantom is expanding its presence on mobile, announcing along with the investment news that it will be rolling out an iOS app soon and an Android native app in the near future. The apps, which are available on Phantom’s website and Chrome extension, are part of efforts to bring a new wave of customers into the cryptocurrency sector, despite there being still doubted among many in the ecosystem whether the web3 space is ready for a wave of less technical participants.
“I’d say the entire space is really early from all perspectives and I think no one really knows how all of this is going to shake out,” Millman says. “It’s still very, very much geared towards professional users all across the stack… and it’s typically something that people kind of wave around and say ‘it’s not for consumers yet,’ but we actually want to help be the team that bridges the gap.”
