With a $9 million investment, Solana-based crypto wallet Phantom has plans to go multi-chain.
Key Takeaways
- Phantom has closed a $9 million Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
- The team will allocate the fresh capital towards growing its team, adding new features, and supporting new blockchains.
- The funding should help Phantom gain ground in the crypto wallet space.
Phantom Wallet To Go Multi-Chain
Phantom, a Solana-based crypto wallet, has closed a $9 million Series A funding round. The raise was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from Solana Foundation, Variant Fund, Jump Capital, and DeFi Alliance. Garry Tan, the co-founder of Initialized Capital and former partner at Y Combinator, also participated alongside several other angel investors.
Phantom is a blockchain wallet that lets users interact with various dApps on Solana, including decentralized exchanges, NFT platforms, and blockchain games. The wallet is supported on popular browsers like Google Chrome, Brave, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge.
According to the Phantom team, the wallet has acquired 40,000 users since its beta launch in April 2021 after receiving a $500,000 grant from Solana Foundation.
The team says it will allocate the fresh capital towards expanding the team and supporting new blockchains, starting with Ethereum and its Layer-2 solutions.
Additionally, the wallet will add new features, such as crypto staking and integration with hardware wallets like Ledger. Later this year, Phantom will release mobile apps for iOS and Android platforms and introduce a fiat onramp through Moonpay.
Arianna Simpson, a partner at a16z, said that the investment firm was “excited to partner” with Phantom, adding:
“Phantom’s mission is to provide a beautiful, easy-to-use wallet that bridges assets and gives users a seamless experience, allowing them to switch between networks without confusion and participate more actively in on-chain activity.”
a16z is among the most influential venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. Since launching, it’s invested in many tech unicorns. In recent years, it’s become more focused on crypto, recently leading Solana’s $314 million token sale and establishing a $2.2 billion crypto fund.
Scoring such an established lead investor could help Phantom gain a competitive edge in the fast-growing space of web-based crypto wallets. Projects like MetaMask, WalletConnect, and Fortmatic currently dominate the sector.
MetaMask, which is a ConsenSys venture, has been particularly successful: it has five million monthly users that access Ethereum, and EVM-compatible chains like Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, Fantom, and xDai.