A wallet is not only a piece of software but a gateway that allows users to participate in the on-chain crypto market. It was yesterday when the Phantom team announced on social media that the wallet has become available for iOS. Today we are going to explore Solana’s most successful software wallet and what it has to offer.

Why is a mobile wallet an important step and how can a mobile wallet change the way how users interact with each other?

Phantom is growing

The growth of Phantom is driven by the fact that the application offers a premium user experience. In March 2021 the project started with an invite-only beta and the actual product was launched only a few months later in July. Within 9 months the wallet became highly popular which is reflected by a couple of achievements:

• $16 billion worth of SOL have been staked
• Over $1.3 billion worth of tokens have been swapped
• More than 55 million transactions were carried out by users

Data shows that Phantom had over 1.8 million users at the beginning of 2022 and is onboarding more than 100.000 users per week ever since then. Only recently the company behind Phantom wallet raised $109 million in a funding round led by Paradigm at a $1.2 billion valuation.

Web3 is the new market

The so-called Web3 is knocking on the door and is about to change the way users are going to interact in the future. This is also represented by the fact that centralized entities like Meta are also counting on a huge shift in the market.

Phantom is important for Solana because it drives user adoption not only in terms of onboarding new users. The app allows users to interact effortlessly with the whole ecosystem Solana has to offer. Staking, lending, providing liquidity, and last not but least NFTs are a finger stroke away.

By extending the outreach on roughly 239 million iOS users worldwide Phantoms taps in huge growth potential for Solana and all protocols related to it. Yet it remains to be seen if the big vision behind Web3 will become reality. Many tech VCs are betting big on the growth of this particular market while it is not clear if a broader user base will be interested in the new digital economy. Critics have pointed out that there is not much of a difference between a centralized Web2 and a decentralized Web3 that is mainly driven by VCs need for income creation.