Solana ecosystem wallet Phantom launches Perptual Futures trading feature, can it break through in fierce competition?

On July 9th, the Solana ecosystem wallet Phantom announced the launch of Perptual Futures trading features, supported by Hyperliquid's API. This move breaks Phantom's recent silence and provides its users with new trading options.

Looking back at the development of Phantom, the company completed three major acquisitions between May 2024 and February 2025. These targets included the token and NFT data platform SimpleHash, the security company Blowfish, and the embedded wallet operator Bitski. In January of this year, Phantom also raised $150 million in a Series C funding round, led jointly by well-known investment institutions Sequoia Capital and Paradigm.

However, in recent months, influenced by the overall market and the aggressive promotion of their own wallets by other major trading platforms, Phantom has faced revenue pullbacks and market growth pressures. In this context, whether Phantom can break through in the fiercely competitive wallet market has become a focus of attention in the industry.

Phantom's New Layout: Integration of Perpetual Futures Trading

Phantom's latest Perptual Futures trading is initially open to users in the EU region. This feature accesses the market through a permissionless integration with Hyperliquid's API, allowing eligible users to trade Perptual Futures directly within their Wallet while maintaining non-custodial control over their positions.

Phantom provides a mobile-centric experience, allowing users to feel that it is an intuitive extension of the core interface, supporting features such as up to 40x leverage, stop loss, take profit, and real-time alerts.

However, this new feature has also raised some users' concerns about fee transparency. Some users worry that Phantom may profit by charging higher fees. However, it has been clarified that the exchange between USDC and SOL actually takes place on Hyperliquid, not on Phantom.

Expansion Steps of Phantom

Phantom started in 2021 as a Web3 Wallet focused on the Solana ecosystem, and has gradually expanded to support multiple blockchains including Ethereum, Polygon, and Bitcoin. Recently, Phantom also launched support for Base and plans to provide support when the Monad blockchain is released.

Between May 2024 and February 2025, Phantom completed three significant acquisitions:

1. Acquisition of the embedded Wallet operator Bitski in May 2024
2. Acquisition of security company Blowfish in November 2024
3. Acquiring the token and blockchain data platform SimpleHash in February 2025

Through these acquisitions, Phantom aims to simplify the crypto experience, enhance the security of users' assets, and improve its data processing capabilities.

Market Pressures Faced

Despite raising $150 million in Series C funding in January 2025, with a valuation of $3 billion and claiming to have 15 million monthly active users, the company still faces fierce market competition.

Data shows that Phantom's main source of income is transaction fees. During peak trading times on the Solana network, Phantom's weekly trading income once exceeded $44 million. However, as other major trading platforms actively promote their own Wallets, Phantom faces pressure in terms of market share.

As of July 9, data shows that Phantom's weekly Swap active trader market share is only 4%, and the weekly Swap trading volume share is only 0.3%. Although these figures are higher than some competitors, there is still a significant gap compared to market leaders.

Overall, Phantom has demonstrated its innovation and market adaptability through the launch of new features, cross-chain support, and strategic acquisitions. However, in the current competitive cryptocurrency wallet market, whether Phantom can break through and achieve sustained growth remains a question worth paying attention to.