I recently gave a talk at Solana’s Accelerate conference in New York City, where I laid out Phantom’s vision for the future of onchain finance. We started Phantom motivated by the firm belief that wallets were broken. As a result, crypto was unable to reach its full potential. Everything we’ve built since day one has been about solving that problem and accelerating the adoption of crypto by making it safe and easy to use.
When we talk about crypto usability, we’re talking about something bigger: making the power of onchain finance approachable and accessible to a global audience. We’re still early in crypto adoption - but we’re building for the future, when everyone will have a “wallet” in their pocket and that wallet will be the hub of their financial life.
Where we’ve been
By focusing on usability, Phantom has become a key driver of growth in the onchain ecosystem. At our peak this year, we served almost 17 million monthly active users—that’s 5x growth over last year and 28x from post-FTX lows in 2023. And these users aren’t just holding crypto, but swapping and using DeFi daily.
It shows in the data. Just in the past few weeks, Solana passed 50% of total DeFi dapp revenue compared to 13% for Ethereum. Decentralized exchange volumes are now growing faster than centralized exchanges, and retail is driving much of this growth.
This is especially true on Solana. While Phantom is and always will be a multi-chain platform, we bet early on the Solana ecosystem because the opportunity was clear. Solana was designed to underpin a global, borderless, internet-scale financial network and addressed many of crypto’s early bottlenecks at the protocol layer.
Why crypto will eat TradFi
TradFi apps like Robinhood, Square, and Chime are more digital than ever. But they’re still locked into old, legacy finance rails. Despite their success, they’re confined by geography, fragmented by regulation, and therefore limited in reach.
Crypto changes the game. With self-custody the total addressable market becomes the entire world. When users control their own keys, the potential network effects become orders of magnitude larger.
This isn’t theoretical—we’ve seen it in action. In Nigeria, a Phantom community spontaneously formed when users went door to door to help friends onboard. They even made their own Phantom t-shirts. That’s the power of crypto: permissionless, community-driven, and truly global. Our job is to unlock more of this behavior. At Phantom we can bridge foundational crypto innovations with best-in-class consumer UX. No more seed phrases, real token verification, safe discovery, multilingual support, modern help systems.
In order to make this vision a reality, we’re going to double down on addressing three core bottlenecks, while expanding the suite of products and services people can access through Phantom.
Onboarding
Good onboarding is do-or-die. If users aren’t able to easily set up their wallets, nothing else matters. Getting started with crypto should feel like using any other app. No more seed phrases. With Phantom’s social login system, we’ve eliminated that barrier.
We also make onboarding fun and personal—custom usernames give users a sense of identity. And it works. We’re seeing a healthy stream of activated users joining and sticking around.
Security
Security will always be one of our top priorities. Open systems are powerful—but they come with threats. Your wallet is like your email inbox: anyone can send you tokens, but not all of them are benign.
We’ve built robust protection layers: token spam filtering, genuine token verification, proactive transaction simulation, and real-time alerts. Earlier this year, we acquired SimpleHash to go even further integrating security features natively into the Phantom app.
Customer support also matters, a lot. Too many crypto companies tell their users “go figure out Discord” when they need help. 1:1 customer service isn't an afterthought at Phantom. We’ve invested millions of dollars in customer support and will continue treating it as a core product feature.
Discovery
Once users are in and safe, they need to know what to do next. Right now, crypto has a huge discovery problem. But we know that crypto is inherently social, just not in a way that lets new or retail users easily participate.
Most people found Phantom because someone they trust helped them. That’s how crypto works today—through word-of-mouth, in Telegram, on X, in group chats.
We’re leaning into that and making social discovery easier and more approachable for all Phantom users. We’re starting to roll out out a set of social features designed to spark network effects that can grow the ecosystem and create more distribution opportunities for developers, apps, tokens and more. First off, we'll be introducing a feed tab in the app which will act as a hub for social discovery. Users will be able to, at a glance, see trending tokens in their network, buys & sells from users they follow, and monitor whale activity. On top of that, we've invested in real time push notification infra so that users will start receiving notifications alerting them to up and coming opportunities in their network.
Imagine this: someone mints an NFT, their friend sees it and reacts, and someone in their network bridges to Solana and joins. That’s the flywheel and how we grow the ecosystem.
Looking ahead
We’re not just building a wallet anymore. We’re building a full-stack finance platform, with the wallet as its home base. We’re building the foundation for global, onchain consumer finance. With the right protocol, the right UX, and a relentless focus on onboarding, security, and discovery, we’re creating something that can scale like the internet itself. This is the moment to push crypto mainstream. If you’re a builder, a creator, or just someone who believes in the future, come join us. Now’s the time…we’re hiring!