Crypto Wallet Phantom Hits Unicorn Status After Raising $109M

Phantom has raised an additional $109 million as the Solana-focused crypto wallet becomes the latest digital asset unicorn. 

The Series B capital raise — bringing the company’s valuation to $1.2 billion — was led by Paradigm. The funding will be used to expand to additional blockchains, add more users and make more hires. In total, Phantom has raised $118 million.

“We decided to raise the money to put more fuel on the fire and keep it going,” Brandom Millman, co-founder and CEO of Phantom said in an interview with Blockworks. 

Even though the wallet caters to Solana users, it plans to expand into other multi-chain ecosystems this year.  Phantom is looking to first add the Ethereum Virtual Machine, or EVM ecosystem. EVM is a platform that developers can use to create decentralized applications, or dApps, on Ethereum.

“Our original impetus was to be a MetaMask competitor, so we want to make moves to realize that and expand to other ecosystems sometime this year,” Millman said. “Phantom was always meant to be the wallet we wanted to use coming from the Ethereum side, so we want to fulfill that.”

The non-custodial crypto wallet now has over 2 million active monthly users, up from virtually zero when it was in beta testing in April 2021. For comparison, the six-year-old Ethereum-focused MetaMask had over 21 million monthly active crypto wallet users as of November 2021.

Last month, Millman told Blockworks he was anticipating anywhere from 10 million to 50 million users in 2022, but now he is holding his stance at the higher end of that range with a “lofty goal of about 50 million.” 

As demand continues to grow, Phantom is also releasing its iOS app to the public, so users can store, send and receive Solana’s SPL tokens and NFTs, as well as stake Solana’s native token, SOL, to earn rewards on their iPhones. The Android app for Phantom will be released during the first half of 2022, he said. 

Users can also preview non-fungible tokens and use the app’s browser to access all decentralized applications, or dApps, in the Solana ecosystem. To date, Phantom users have staked 112.4 million SOL, roughly $10.4 billion, swapped $1.37 billion in tokens and made $55.2 million in NFTs, DeFi and app transactions.

“We have come from a graveyard of wallets before us that came and went during the last crypto cycle,” Millman said. “It’s tremendous validation for wallets and Web3 in general as an area to create awesome, investable long lasting businesses.”

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Source: https://blockworks.co/crypto-wallet-raises-109-million/