ceo / co-founder @phantom | ex-@0xProject, @twitter / @x
San Francisco, CA
Joined January 2011
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New data out today on how Americans feel about the financial system. Phantom helped sponsor this research through @fund_defi, and @Ipsos ran it independently on the same panel the Fed uses. What stood out: people want more control over their money than they have now. 🧵
Ask those open to DeFi what they’d use it for and the answers are everyday: save money (85%), send money to friends or family in the US (82%), earn yield (82%). Saving and sending already work in Phantom: fund from your bank, hold stablecoins, spend with a Visa card.
We supported this research to get an independent read on what Americans (not just crypto users) want from their money. The answer matches one of our core beliefs: more control. Tens of millions use Phantom to get it. We’ll keep making it easier. research.defieducationfund.o…
Brandon Millman retweeted
1/ This week, @phantom is putting our no action letter to work. US users will soon be able to access Kalshi to trade prediction markets from within the Phantom app, where users can maintain max control over their assets while accessing a regulated product. phantom.com/learn/blog/phant…
Brandon Millman retweeted
We have some killer openings right now at @phantom.
- Staff SRE (Data pipelines)
- Senior Data Eng
- Staff Full stack Eng (Trust)
- Senior+ software Eng (Wallet)
- Software Eng (Growth)
- Staff Security Eng
- Staff ML Eng
- +++ more (link below)
DMs open 🫡
Most of the people who found @phantom early got here because a friend showed them the app. Now when you refer someone to Phantom, you get paid for it.
Back in August I posted that we’d seen the feedback about changes to Phantom, especially the ones that made it harder to find the core actions users rely on day to day. We heard you loud and clear and are now rolling out a number of fixes. Here's an update on where that stands.
Send and Deposit buttons are rolling out front and center on the Home tab again, you can create seed phrases during onboarding, Apple Pay on-ramping now lands in seconds, not longer. These are the first of a much bigger set of changes rolling out now in response to your feedback.
We’ll keep shipping until we’ve made Phantom as easy to use as it used to be, so please keep the feedback coming.
In March, Phantom became the first passive software provider to receive no-action relief from the CFTC. We're grateful to the CFTC for working with us to chart a new path for non-custodial software providers to connect people with regulated markets, all while the provider never holds users' funds or makes decisions about their trades.
Now the CFTC has opened that same path to other software providers, and that's a win for the whole industry. This is how it should work: software built to protect consumers, paired with regulated partners, giving more people safe access to the financial services they want 🤝.
.@CFTC Staff Issues No-Action Position to Providers of Passive Software: cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressRele…
Arc is live in @phantom today.
Circle built it on a simple idea: money should be internet-native. Real-time, always on, settled fast, interoperable. We agree. Congrats to @arc @circle and @jerallaire.
Big picture: markets should be open to anyone, usable by anyone. Everyone should be able to control their own money, and plug into markets that never close. That's the freedom of open markets, and every rail like Arc gets more people there.
Earlier this year, Phantom updated its mission to: Connect the world to the freedom of open markets.
The biggest opportunity of the next decade is giving normal people access to financial opportunities they’ve never had access to before, with a level of freedom and control only self-custody can offer.
Throughout this evolution, we've tried to maintain the flexibility that power users rely on, while stripping away the complexity that's kept a lot of other people from experiencing the benefits of crypto. The consumer experience isn't all the way there yet. But we're getting closer.
A lot of Phantom has changed already, and a lot more change is inevitable. I know it can be pretty uncomfortable for the people who've been using and supporting Phantom the longest. Changing something you use every day is disruptive, and I don't take that lightly.
We're very grateful for the millions of people who use Phantom, and I hear your feedback everyday. If you've been with us a long time, keep the feedback coming. But I hope we’ve also earned the trust of users over the last 5+ years, and earned the benefit of the doubt on where this evolution is headed.
Luckily we're not just starting this process now. We’re in the middle of it, which can be painful. But no matter what, self-custody and access to open markets, at a global scale, is still the foundation for everything we’re building next.
I agree with @vibhu and the Solana foundation: the crypto ecosystem has evolved and the wallet needs to evolve as well.
As a product, Phantom has been undergoing big transformations over the past year. A lot of this work is already live: seedless login via Apple or Google, seamless swaps that abstract away gas and bridging, social usernames over raw wallet addresses, unified cash balances funded by built-in onramps (fund with everything from Apple Pay to ACH). And there’s definitely more to come.
In order to power this this evolution, we’ve rebuilt our self-custody and onchain finance stack from the ground up, giving us the foundation to redefine what a wallet can be: hiding the sharp edges of crypto while giving users the power of open, permissionless markets.
For crypto founders, the biggest lesson from @fomo and @Pumpfun ascendance is that the distribution model of the last 5 years for apps is moot.
Web3 is dead, wallet connect is dead, dApps are dead.
The new plan is vertically integrated mobile: hide the crypto mechanics entirely. Single balance across chains, integrated onramp (Apple Pay is king), no bridges, no seed phrases or private keys (sign in with Google or X).
For wallet apps themselves, this presents an existential crisis. The user demands simplicity & the feeling of safety. In the past, your wallet was a gateway to crypto. Now, I hold a deposit in each app I use and I don't yet care if they talk to each other.
As always, we go through bundling and unbundling cycles. If Phantom and Jupiter and Metamask were bundling, we are now seeing a great unbundling.