The company building Solana’s top crypto wallet is now worth $1.2 billion, Phantom announced Monday.
Crypto venture firm Paradigm led a $109 million Series B investment in Phantom, CEO Brandon Millman said. It was not immediately clear who else joined the cap table, or what percentage equity they took in the upstart firm, whose main product is a Chromium browser plugin.
The wallet is going mobile, too: On Monday, the company debuted its iOS app. Millman expects his 20-odd team to ship an Android offering later this year, following through on a mission to get Solana’s most widely used crypto wallet in people’s pockets.
Phantom’s popular non-custodial service has become near-critical infrastructure for Solana-based decentralized finance; Millman claimed to command “at least 90%” market share. (CoinDesk could not independently verify this figure.)
It’s managed to do so in a rather unorthodox way. In an industry marked by open-source philosophies, Phantom, a private company, keeps wallet code under wraps. Even as its competitor wallets let their doors swing open, Phantom’s remain shut.
Read more: Coinbase Close to Listing Solana Ecosystem Tokens: Sources
Millman said Phantom “definitely has aspirations” to go open-source but “it has been difficult to prioritize.” It hasn’t yet due to a mix of operational, practical and competitive considerations, he said. Once that “Pandora’s box” is open it will be impossible to go back.
“Once it's open-source, there’s this implicit expectation around responding to people who are leaving issues on the GitHub