Phantom has come out as a unicorn after its latest Series B capital raise, led by Paradigm, pushed up the company’s valuation to $1.2 billion. The crypto wallet platform raised an additional $109 million, a total of $118 million.
Brandom Millman, the co-founder, and CEO of Phantom, said they decided to raise the money to keep the company going. Phantom will use the funding to expand to additional blockchains, recruit and add more users. The company plans to expand into other multi-chain ecosystems this year. But first, it wants to add the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
Millman said their original impetus was to be a MetaMask competitor. Phantom wants to realize that and expand to other ecosystems as well. Millman says the platform was always meant to be a wallet from the Ethereum side. It has more than two million active monthly users. The platform gained from virtually zero in April 2021 when it was in the beta testing phase.
Moreover, Phantom is targeting 10 million to 50 million users in 2022. But Millman is holding onto the higher end of 50 million. He believes that as demand grows, the platform is growing too. Phantom is releasing its iOS app for users to store, send and receive Solana’s SPL tokens and NFTs, as well as stake SOL to earn rewards. As for the Android app, Phantom will release the same in the first half of 2022.
Millman said users can preview their NFTs and use the app’s browser to access decentralized applications (DApps) in the Solana ecosystem. So far, the platform’s users have staked 112.4 million SOL, worth about $10.4 billion. About $1.3 billion tokens have been swapped and $55.2 million in NFTs.
