E115: Phantom CEO: How This Crypto Wallet hit 15M+ Users and a $3B Valuation in just 3 years

47:53And so they would always, and even to this day, it's very difficult to get onto certain uh certain chains unless there's like a centralized exchange that directly natively supports them uh and supports you know their token ecosystems right and so you had ftx who obviously at that point was uh this up-and-coming star and well uh you know and had direct support for solana and tokens and everything and so we viewed that as a very key pillar to the ecosystem um and then yeah i think thirdly is like what we already kind of touched on which was uh identifying and resonating the most with the solana founders and their ethos around pragmatism and all of that so i think all of those things combined and helped us push and feel confident enough to bet at Solana.

48:55How much do you think that the fact that you live and work in San Francisco and that the Solana team does too, at least one of the co-founders, played a role in you trusting them more than other people? And we live in this industry where everything is online, Telegram, Twitter, blah, blah, blah. but the actual truth is and i can see it when i interview i'm here now in silicon valley so i do everyone one after the other yeah the overlaps between everyone is crazy i work with this guy there are these uh my kids go to school with their kids oh i'm invested in the six different of their company oh i was in this fund before and now it's just everybody knows each other right and so i feel like you're much more and you say the same happens i live in singapore i'm pretty close to jupiter and all these people like you proximity is massive yeah it's very important how much did just the proximity with solana founders in terms of location payroll um yeah that's a good question well yeah at that point both raj and anatoly were were silicon valley based and sf based and so yeah there's definitely an element of being able to meet them very early on face to face also during i mean this is also during covet and all that and so being able to actually make that like direct human connection i think definitely also contributed to feeling that sense of trust with them but i think even even maybe one step further is that the ethos of pragmatism and being technology forward is a byproduct of being in silicon valley and having careers uh you know having careers in technology companies and things like that and so i'd say that's probably more of the common thread is that they we we all had upbringings so to speak during like you know during like peak silicon valley essentially and so all of those all of those learnings and teachings and ways of building product sort of encoded in the way they they thought and same with us and so i'd say that's probably a common thread absolutely i i had also two weeks ago yogo yogo monica was at twitter and knows everyone i was in the street office yesterday and they were all facebook employees like you can feel it yeah when you arrive in the office you're like the atmosphere here is incredible and you and it's it's not even I was talking with, I'm here with a friend and I was telling him, I mean, obviously these people are working hard and very smart, but also that's how they were shaped.

51:48They don't even have to reinvent everything. They saw like, what was the culture at Facebook or Twitter? And like, and you can feel it, the energy. And they were just saying, Adény and Eva, and they're just saying, oh, look, our office there. And this is the same as Facebook. The Facebook office, like, looked the same. Yeah. Right. And we just like, we produce the same thing. And then you have this atmosphere and this way of thinking and this practicality that makes, that literally created, I take my phone, all the apps, the five apps I'm using every day coming from here. And Tommy is one of them.

52:25Like literally, you're right. So it's crazy. When you think about it, it's really crazy. And we're working in Palo Alto and we're just walking in the street. and this Palo Alto place, it's just a normal village, right? You're just thinking like, oh man, I'm here. It's just a normal village with some building where you wouldn't even know that Facebook is there or Sui is there, et cetera, but they're there. It's crazy. Yeah, you see the self-driving car and then you're like, oh, okay. You get reminded where you are. Yeah, I mean, on top of that, both my co-founders, they're also Silicon Valley guys like Chris, very early Facebook employee original designer on Facebook Messenger.

53:07Francesco also worked at Early Yelp. And so, yeah, I mean, it's a different culture for sure. And yeah, it's all about building and doing and sort of showing and not telling. I think that was all very encoded from the beginning. And yeah, I think that definitely had a piece to play in terms of why we chose Solana. listening to your story, you say, we wanted to build a better UX, right? But the key factor was, and that made the difference with all the other wallets, was choosing an ecosystem, becoming poor position in this ecosystem. So most people might think, oh, these guys did an amazing job, but they were also pretty lucky to be in the right ecosystem.

54:01If I think a bit further, how much is phantom one of the reasons why solana succeeded succeeded and became that big i mean i think we had a huge role definitely obviously it's a whole ecosystem and group effort but I think that I think we did set the tone for the bar for usability and UX and UI on Solana there was a very yeah I mean there was a very high bar for wallets all wallets on Solana are in my opinion a lot better designed and a lot smoother and easier to use compared to Ethereum wallets. And I think that's partially because of the bar that we set. Yeah, like I said, a wallet is really a user's first time experience and first time, it sets the first impression when you use a new blockchain.

55:14And I mean, anecdotally, we just saw all of the reactions on Twitter. It's like, oh, wow, I really just, when you spent so many years using metamask and then you come and then you use phantom and solana combination for the first time it just felt like almost like magic and it's like oh whoa this is like this is like how it's supposed to feel i'm not going back yeah exactly and then it feels like and then when people end up going back to metamask like whoa it's like literally getting it's like being stuck in sludge or something it's like um so yeah i do think that first impressions really matter.

55:50And then that having that really clean first time experience really helped set the tone. And yeah, in general, I think we raised the bar as well for the entire ecosystem. So what made the difference? So you said propositions, Solana, UX wasn't enough, but obviously you have to work on like amazing UX. What made a difference out out of all the wallets out there for Fantom to become the most used wallet in crypto within three years? Well, yeah, I mean, we talk a lot about usability and UX and UI, but what really underpins all of that is just having a very user-centric mindset when building the entire experience.

56:36And what I mean by that is a user, being a user first product doesn't just mean having a good UX UI within the bounds of just the app. And so that means, it means having the user, this user first mentality, basically holistically across, you know, many different vectors. And so there's the user's experience within the app. There's the user education, blog posts, safety tips, those types of things. The way that we communicate on Twitter, prioritizing customer support and all of those things. Those are all parts of being very user-centric and user-first when building like a whole, when thinking about their user journey holistically which i think most other wallets don't really think about or it's a little bit of a afterthought um and yeah it's such a weird thing that in crypto like it's it's sort of like the state of the art is to like of of customer support is like hey go to the discord and like figure it out basically and it's it's really strange why that's the case when there's literally decades of prior learnings and experience that anyone can take from web 2.0 or whatever you want to call it where like you know there's proven customer support models and everything.

58:14So, you know, at Phantom, we had very, very lucky to actually have this guy, Dave Pasden, who leads our customer support function, one of the very first hires. And he actually used to lead customer support at MetaMask. And prior to that was running customer support at Coinbase. And he was actually able to help us see around all of the corners, basically around like, hey, you need to have all of these systems in place so that when the waves come crashing down you're not stuck in this like unlimited like limitless backlog of users right so you have to set everything up in the beginning to be able to handle those huge waves and that's a little bit of a theme in crypto in general is like the the adoption comes in these like crashing waves uh where there's huge specs of activity all coming at once and if you can't really handle if you don't have enough elasticity in all of your operations to be able to handle that then you can fall behind very quickly and so you even see that with like coinbase today like there people are still waiting they're like oh i had you know there's i'm waiting for this ticket to get this customer support ticket to get answered for months and and all of that and at phantom we treat customer support as a first class operation has actual performance metrics like time to resolve the ticket, time to response, like the velocity of tickets that are being handled.

59:52And I guarantee you a vast majority of products in crypto are not even thinking about that at all. And to me, that's what it means to be actually user first and not just about UX, UI, by having some pretty colors, basically. What is Phantom Wallet? If you were to explain it to your mom.

1:00:17uh that's a good question well well i okay i'll answer that but i think i also want to maybe take it a little bit further Well, first of all, I guess I'd answer it by saying it is a consumer finance application that helps you gain access to financial services on the internet. That's how I would explain it to my mom. i think a trap that a lot of people get fell fall into in the crypto ecosystem is like how can we how can we make this usable for my grandma or how can we make this usable for um previous generations and honestly the fact of the matter is you know your grandma is never going to use phantom and And what we should actually be focusing on is the next generation internet native age, you know, who, who they understand memes, they understand technology.

1:01:19And so I think that's, that's like a pretty common trap that I feel like people are like, oh my, you know, my mom's never going to use this or whatever. And, you know, I think that's fine. you know, you know, the new, you know, Gen Z and beyond is very different internet native age who they're using apps like Square Cash and stuff as sort of their first financial experiences. So anyway, that's just a comment on that. If you had to start Phantom again, or new crypto app in general in 2025, five, what ecosystem would you focus on to build this pole position that was so important for Phantom?

1:02:10Well, that's a good question. I mean, in general, the answer would be Solana, which I think at first sounds like a little bit of a lazy answer but i basically don't think that another solana is ever going to happen again uh when a blockchain a new when a new blockchain comes out they have to capture a certain use case and narrative and solana really did a great job in capturing like the fast and cheap we're the fast and cheap uh blockchain right no one is ever really going to be able to do that again my opinion and so they're going to have to focus on other things like specifically on gaming or specifically on institutional or whatever solana also came up during a very specific time you know on planet earth where covid was happening there was you know obviously the whole interest rate phenomenon, etc.

1:03:21And so I think that in terms of timing and narrative, it's going to be very difficult to replicate what they did. And so I guess my answer would be like, Solana again. That being said, there's definitely some interesting up-and-comers. You integrated Phantom with Suite, for example? yes sweet i think is really interesting one i think that their their angle well i think the move ecosystem is is interesting in general and that um similarly to solana which sort of had this like nerd sniping effect where they would people would naturally gravitate towards solana by virtue of of smart contracts being written in rust and then finding the rust to be very interesting have very interesting properties.

1:04:16Move also, you know, the Move ecosystem has something similar where they can actually foster like a more genuine developer ecosystem around people who are really enthused and excited about Move as a language. What's interesting about that actually is that when Solana was up and coming, that was always used as like a reason why solana will never work because evm had so much network effect because like evm had so much tooling and mindshare and because of that like there's no way a non-evm blockchain would ever work and interestingly what have ended up happening in reality was this opposite effect where people who were interested in solana were a lot more genuine people who are interested and all these evm chains that were coming out after ethereum actually attracted this type of person who is sort of like a copy and paste drive by type of developer who would just like take uniswap copy and paste it onto polygon or copy and paste it onto Avalanche just to do something quick.

1:05:37Yeah, Solana had this early mantra of developers chewing glass together, which I think, yeah, this sort of shared trauma around excavating this new technology really served to form a genuine core of developers, which is extremely hard to replicate. I think SWE is quite interesting because they're trying to do something similar with developers. And so, yeah, I think we wanted to make a bet on the move ecosystem in general. It just we. You mentioned before that at some point, the idea was always how do we attack Metamask from the side? Once we established the pole position in Solana, when is the right moment to go attempt to take over the larger player?

1:06:31oh I mean you know we're the larger player now I mean or I mean and we have been actually for for a while which is the interesting thing but what when we tried to do it it was in 2023 and we had just yeah we had started in 2021 there was this first arc of Solana which was all about nfts and you know 2021 through 2022 we really were sort of like in this hand-to-hand combat phase with all the different wallets on solana and we had come out on top by the end of 2022 how did you do that how did you capitalize because there was this crazy price appreciation obviously I think 100x plus, right, of Sol in 2021.

1:07:25How much do you capitalize on that moment before the bad stuff that happened afterwards that we're going to obviously talk about in that phase? How did you manage to come at the top? Well, yeah, I mean, part of it is this realization that you have to be in the pole position very early. And so getting there first was extremely important. i mean at the time that phantom came out there was basically nothing on the market it was just solid um you had soulflare as well but they weren't really a full app it was just more of like a web experience and so we were the first ones to really come on to solana and have an extension-based wallet which was actually another interesting insight going extension first was something that was non-consensus actually at that time most people were trying to go mobile first on ethereum at least um so we were the first extension based wallet to really be uh yeah easily used with defy and nfts and so yeah a lot of it is attributable attributable to being grabbing that pole position first.

1:08:42But then second, yeah, I mean, we just really had that user-first mindset, really focused on a lot of user-first features or user-first processes and operations, like I mentioned, having very early on, having a very strong customer support function, very early on building user safety tool like user safety features transaction simulation was is something that's like like a industry standard now when you when you sign a transaction but had not really been explored actually until we popularized it in 2022 and so yeah i think combination of those things helped us navigate that time and then there's also at that time 2022 the most popular thing going on was nfts so having very strong nft support um it's it's it feels dumb to say now but like just having nfts automatically show up in your wallet was not the standard thing back then like and so uh and even having tokens automatically show up in your wallet a lot of people don't forget like in metamask originally in order to have a token show up you would have to actually manually add it and so still sometimes today yeah and it's written there is a new token identified but you need to go on yeah which really we just took the opposite approach where we would index and discover everything which is actually still like a growing huge problem but then get really good at applying sort of like spam filters and things like that kind of like an email inbox and so anyway so yeah 2022 we're able to uh yeah ride the nft quite nft wave quite well and really focus in and dial in the user experience um and so and uh release a mobile app very quickly was another thing we went we were extension first but then we just four to five months after we initially released we were able to get a mobile lab out very soon as well and that was actually also pretty pivotal to um riding the nft wave effectively um and so anyway going a couple steps back and answering your original question of like when is the right time to go multi-chain once once we went through 2022 we felt like we're in a pretty stable spot by the end of it and then that's when we started to re-architect the app to build these like multi-chain features.

1:11:42That was 2022. And then sort of end of 2022, beginning of 2023 is when we really had some time to breathe. And we had been basically fighting all these fires and fighting off all these opponents and competitors. And, you know, a lot of Phantom at that point was being held together by like, you know, sticks and chewing gum so to speak and then so now that we finally had a little bit of a breather it's like early 2023 era it's like okay let's actually like refactor the app a little bit and because our original plan was to uh graduate from this like mono chain wallet to multi-chain wallet it's the perfect opportunity to build these multi-chain features um and so yeah that's when we felt was like the right time.

1:12:34So we had all this momentum, we had a chance to breathe. So we started building out all the multi chain features early 2023. You wrote the crazy Solana 2021 wave, crazy price appreciation, NFT craze. And you managed to get out of that at the top position in wallets. but whatever goes up too quickly must come down quickly career business stock or even a crypto less than two years after you started phantom but i experienced a life defining crisis with the blow up of ftx one of the biggest solana backers why did you stay

1:13:22yeah i mean that was such a crazy time and also it was just really unfortunate timing because i was I was just describing like the whole arc right like at the end of 2022 beginning of 2023 we finally had this breather where we could finally fulfill some of these original multi-chain plans by the time that we were ready to release like multi-chain more broadly was literally at the end of 2023 like when all the development was like finished and all of a sudden like FTX happened right which is like just really unfortunate timing because we were like okay we just we just added support for ethereum and and polygon and the polygon being the most popular evm chain outside of ethel one at that time and when we released it it was basically right after the ftx implosion and it was basically viewed as this like betrayal of solana so it's kind of a very difficult thing to to navigate and just really bad timing um because of course we were not of course it takes time to build this thing right it takes time to build out all this multi-chain infrastructure it's not like ftx happened and then in a week we're like hey now we're multi-chain um so it was really bad timing and that in itself was also something that we had to navigate um and so but why did we decide to stay i think that fundamentally you know i mentioned all these things that we saw from solana early on i think all those fundamentals were still there and although ftx being this primary centralized exchange partner player in the ecosystem although that went away i think that all the other fundamental things that we saw and especially in 2020 especially in 2022 it really became clear like hey this new this there's actually a new wave of people onboarding here it's a completely different set of people that were on ethereum because because it was faster and cheaper it was literally a completely different demographic that was being onboarded and we saw those signals really early on um and yeah you know folks who are who can't afford to pay 50 to 100 dollars of gas fees on every transaction, right?

1:16:04It just unlocked this like, brand new set of users. And we saw that firsthand. So that, on top of all the fundamentals of Solana not changing, how do you see that? That these are new people? If there's no KYC, you don't know exactly who your customer is? Like, how do you know that? I mean, it makes sense. It's logical, right? But how do you concretely, you're a very data-driven person, from what I understand, probably. I mean, we talked about that before, right? Even at Twitter, you were looking at the data. Even at 0x, you're like, hey, look, we're losing 50 % of the people here because of MetaMask.

1:16:43How do you know this is a new type of people? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, it was just the behavior, their behaviors. I mean, it was a completely different type of behavior. And the sort of people buying sort of like the lower market cap NFTs, it was just something that was just not happening on Ethereum. And it was just something completely different. And so you're right, it was hard to prove that it was a completely different segment because in our eyes, they're just addresses and transactions happening on the blockchain. But the type of behavior was just completely different. And it was also a lot more mobile first in a way that Ethereum never really had.

1:17:37And then also there's a lot of anecdotal evidence as well that folks that we knew, they had a they had a a cousin who had like someone at work who was getting into solana nfts and stuff so a lot of the a lot of the signals were there um but yeah like i said it was not only that but it was also the fundamentals of solana not changing i think just gave us a lot of conviction to double down and something that was very interesting that happened post ftx with solana was that it was sort of like this mass purging event where everyone who remained were like all of the true believers so to speak and again that formed like a really genuine core in which today's ecosystem is built so like a lot of the i mean i guess you can call it a lot of the weak hands quote-unquote got washed out and then a lot of like the true believers stayed and uh yeah that actually formed the basis of like the very strong community that we see today uh which is kind of it's kind of interesting because yeah ftx was always framed as this mass this extinction event at that time but actually it was sort of like this purification test of some sort where like only the true believers stayed um so uh interesting you said sometimes i mean in entrepreneurship in general being crypto is so crazy that it hits even more you say we have to find a a reason to keep going you have an example or two where you kind of go to this point where you were i'm not gonna say near abandoning but where you were kind of questioning the what you're doing which i think we all do yeah now and then i mean i mean yeah ftx is a big one i mean that one was like being like in a slow motion car crash for like two or three weeks i was just like whoa like we were like on fire for so for so long and then it literally just all came crashing down and that was like that one was crazy because i was literally at solana breakpoint when that was happening or like i was and like there there was like the public fighting between cz and spf and i was like no one like really knew what was going on and then like the plane ride back i was just like whoa like this is like this is like getting crazy um so yeah i mean ftx was definitely you know one of those moments um but yeah i mean I think it all comes back down to trying to achieve this mission, just to accelerate the adoption of crypto, genuinely believing that crypto is a positive force for good in the world.

1:20:43And one of the side effects of being a permissionless and open ecosystem is that is exactly that. There's so many different things going on. and so much experimentation going on that there's good parts, there's bad parts. It's kind of a double-edged sword to being a permissionless open ecosystem. Early internet is exactly the same. And so I think our role is to really just help users navigate that world, keep them safe, and keep them, yeah, basically keep them safe them safe as they're exploring basically very much very akin to how you know the the browsers roll in in on the web or even an email client like in g like gmail if you look in your spam folder it's successful right like there's all sorts of people trying to scam you and fish you or whatever but they did a really great job just providing taking this open permissionless protocol and you know developing a safe and easy experience on top of that and then obviously email completely changed the way that people communicate and arguably you know propelled human society and so yeah just you know going back to that original mission and just you know truly believing that crypto is a force for good i think that's uh one of those things that keeps the entire team going you said at phantom we believe that crypto is a huge positive force in the world not just a new age 20 24 7 casino

1:22:30what makes you wake up every day and go to your phantom office

1:22:37well i mean yeah i'm how do you explain to someone who is like this is just a casino 24-7 and you guys are a huge player, you draw in fascinating that casino. How do you explain someone who sees the crypto industry pejoratively in a bad fashion and explain them or evangelize the huge positive forces in the world that it can bring? Well, nowadays, it's actually a lot easier to do that because of what's happening outside of this crazy casino aspect, which is there's literally all the infrastructure around stable coins, massive fintechs getting into crypto. All of that is very clear evidence that there is something greater here.

1:23:30There is this broader internet-scale finance system, internet-native finance system that's being built. and we're actually finally seeing that end of the tunnel like right at the end of the tunnel today um because during all of these basically during each one of these speculative waves like 2017 2020 um 2017 2017 was icos 2020 defy summer 2021 nfts 2025 and 2024 meme coins during each one of those waves huge amount of capital and users come into the system and infrastructure gets built roads you know public goods etc and each time that happens we get a little bit closer and closer to realizing sort of like this final vision of sort of quote-unquote true utility of crypto and i think for this last wave a number of step functions got realized so the emergence of solana and faster the the true culmination of a of a blockchain that is fast and cheap enough for the vast majority of people on earth to use and especially on a mobile form factor as well that's a huge thing that happened in the last wave was that crypto on mobile got unlocked and on top of that there's there's technological infrastructure but there's also financial infrastructure stripe get buying bridge getting into stable coins leading the way for other fintechs like the true finally the true vision of having this us back us dollar backed cryptocurrency where you can take it pay for coffee with it pay for things on the internet with it that's like finally happening now and so i mean why why would we stop now like that's that's that's what's happened that we're like basically on the precipice of achieving that you mentioned crypto getting really big on uh mobile mobile apps in late November 2024 Phantom became one of the most downloaded apps in the App Store ahead of WhatsApp Instagram I think just be just behind chat GPT so basically ahead of many other big Silicon Valley and see San Francisco big names how did that feel um well yeah I mean that was crazy moment Yeah, I think we hit like, I don't know, number three or number four, like on the iOS app store.

1:26:15And yeah, I mean, it felt it was very validating in some sense, because it's like a very objective measure that you can show anyone else, anyone who doesn't know about crypto or your mom or whatever. And it's very clear, like, you know, the adoption is there. So yeah, I mean, it felt awesome, felt validating.

1:26:45I don't know much more than that. It was great. How much did that help you think much bigger in terms of what's possible for crypto and for Phantom Wallet?

1:27:02Yeah, I think it did open my eyes in terms of, wow, we do have this massive distribution. Like, people all across the world, many different countries are downloading Phantom. And Phantom is actually truly a global phenomenon. on and we actually have this very unique opportunity in front of us to actually actually evolve into the next you know the next mass market consumer finance app um in a way that other traditional finance consumer apps can't really do like square cash venmo revolute robin hood to some extent they don't they don't have access to the same sort of global audience that we do they don't have access to the same sort of open permissionless networks that we do and so yeah i think that did that really did put into focus like we actually have the distribution to actually to make that final leap to start competing with you know the big boys basically so people would go on the app store and would see gpt instagram whatsapp and then they would see this app with a phantom on the top where does the logo and the name come from uh yeah that's a good story actually the name phantom is actually derived from metamask there's actually a direct connection there where my co-founder and i basically actually not too far from here we're uh walking down mission street basically uh and we had been ideating about this concept of building a metamask competitor and i think we yeah we were a couple drinks in and we're just riffing off of different concepts right and so we were we we had this visual of like hey we have to we have to remove the mask uh like we have to de-mask the ecosystem like we have to we have to like remove the mask and see what's behind the mask whatever and i think and then my co-founder just said oh phantom of the opera and i was like oh phantom is a really good name and then on the spot i just like looked up a is phantom.com available which the answer was no although we have phantom.com now which is another story but phantom.app was available and i was like that's a perfect domain i literally bought it like right there um so that's actually how the name was derived actually comes from actually comes from metamask which is interesting um and then the logo is also interesting because the logo that we have today is actually not the logo that we started with the logo that we started with was designed by my co-founder chris uh who is designer by trade he just quickly put something together on in figma and that was what was the original ghost that looked like a little bit more like a chat bubble um and so that was the original icon and then the icon that we have now the logo is actually basically coincided with a little bit of a reinvention of the company coincided with hey we went from the small chain wallet to multi-chain wallet we wanted to just basically give the entire brand a new foundation to be able to have like a very unique identity and unique like visual style and so uh it was that during that time that we started experimenting with new logos and it was actually very controversial because i was like obviously we were we had already gone through 2021 2022 with the old logo and we already had this brand recognition and uh my co-founder chris he was like we should we should up level our brand and and develop this new logo i was like that seems really risky but I trust you fully and ended up being the right move because now it's a lot more very iconic and a lot more visually distinct so um anyway that's like a little bit about the logo and name earlier this year you raised a huge funding round of 150 million dollars at the three billion dollar valuation why um what kind of goes back to a little bit what I was talking about earlier, which is, well, part of it is in crypto, you want to survive for as long as possible.

1:32:02And in my opinion, you can never acquire too many resources or raise too much money. And so, you know, we wanted to secure ourselves, secure the company, and build enough of a war chest so that we can always remain long-term thinking.

1:32:33second is we do have these aspirations to like complete this sort of second leg and transformation into global consumer finance platform and we wanted to bring all of the biggest players and investors onto the table and so we brought in so you know sequoia was the lead for the for the around sequoia's legendary silicon valley investor uh responsible for pretty much all of the consumer finance apps you know today robin hood new bank all this all these guys and so they were the perfect um sort of like new blood to get into the into the the company to actually fulfill like this next leg. So it's part strategic, part securing the company in terms of resources and just making sure that we can always remain super long-term thinking no matter what happens.

1:33:37You said before, Phantom has a huge advantage when compared to these finance apps that you want to disrupt, such as Robinhood and Revolut. Phantom is built on the top of crypto. It is open and permissionless. What does this mean if you had to explain it to a Robinhood user who doesn't understand much about crypto?

1:34:02Yeah, well, I think, so one, I'd say to a Robinhood user, I'd say basically it gives them access to financial tools and investment opportunities that they would not normally have access to to a to a robin hood user that would sort of be the angle it's like so what is what is a robin hood user trying to do when they download robin hood it's to access basically new invest new investment opportunities and so for phantom we bring a whole new world, not only the existing ones that they're used to, like a whole new world of potential investment opportunities. And that's how I position it to like the prototypical Robinhood user.

1:34:57For example, what would you tell a Robinhood user? Because Robinhood is doing a massive push with the crypto, right? Yeah. What would you tell them? Hey, look, like this is, you have access to this range of opportunities, but look, with us, this is how much bigger this range of opportunities yeah well it's it's not only about bigger but it's also about being there first which is also a big aspect of investing or trading you know you want the alpha so to speak you want you need to be there first the way that robinhood and even coinbase is set up is that they're always trailing behind just just yesterday or something like they added they added like peanut coin or these various meme coins and i'm like i'm like that those are like months late right you're many months late not even a month yeah like almost yeah like and i'm like okay so it's very clear to any robin hood user that if they do want access to these new things, whatever they might be, Phantom is the only way to basically access the bleeding edge.

1:36:11So that's sort of one of the main positives for Phantom. You go as far as to say that Revolut and Robinhood just can't compete with Phantom. And I was thinking, I know Ben from Bybit, for example, people, top exchanges out there. I know the guys from Jupiter really well. And when the Trump coin launched, I really understood on-chain power. Yeah. In terms of how fast, right? Exactly that. And I started to think in my mind without telling it, these centralized exchanges are finished. I mean, obviously it's probably not going to happen as quickly as i might think whatever or maybe it's not true but if i think very very simplistically yeah if more and more people understand on-chain power and faster access right everything else given a given a long uh term like frame enough right it's finished yeah what do you think about that no yeah totally i mean i think that's that's definitely the case like centralized exchanges like coinbase or uh kraken or whatever they made the right choice for them at the time that they were built the raw raw blockchain was very difficult and very hard for a normal user to use and expensive and you to use bitcoin you have to wait six confirmation blocks and all this kind of stuff.

1:37:55And so they're like, hey, let's just abstract all that away and create this and package it up in this centralized experience where we can hide all the details, right? That was the perfect choice for them. And for the industry as a whole. Yeah. To be able to get people to bootstrap the ecosystem, so to speak. But now the number of tokens appearing on chain is exploding and centralized exchanges have this like they're basically like have like a pickaxe where it's like and you know versus something more versus having the bow and arrow or whatever right like they they have this very one-dimensional tool which is like an exchange and like listing tokens onto the exchange that's the only tool that they have to compete obviously coinbase has evolved and now they have base and coinbase wallet and all of that but yeah i mean it's kind of an old paradigm and now they have this new paradigm there's this new paradigm where you basically have to you have to go from you have to transform from listing to indexing basically or you have to act as a tool that actually discovers and indexes new tokens as they come because they're coming out so quickly.

1:39:20And so yeah, it's, if they don't are not able to transform themselves, they're not going to be able to compete. And because of all the network effects involved in these like open permissionless networks, it just becomes like this sort of like avalanche, essentially. So yeah, I mean, you know, I think that, you know, that's something that we saw very early on at ZeroX as well. Like ZeroX's whole whole vision was that there was going to be this world where like there's millions of tokens flowing freely from point a to point b and you know the only way to be able to navigate that world is decentralized exchange and that is actually literally happening right now um and so but yeah so yeah you see like robin hood's like basically struggling to list new tokens in a timely fashion and they have to completely change their model which is very hard to do to completely reinvent yourself as a company your ultimate goal is at phantom is to eat try to fight does that mean

1:40:34yeah uh basically that means well it means it's it's sort of multi-dimensional it means a fulfilling some of the initial vision of crypto where it's actually a complete alternate finance system to the traditional finance system help actually promote its growth and promote um sort of this network effect that i've been describing where you have this open permissionless network there's so much activity and so much so many users and developers that tradfi so to speak doesn't really can't really compete um it also means taking the things that people normally use taking the jobs to be done that people use tradfi for and doing them better so sending money from point a to point b interacting with businesses getting access to new investment opportunities like everyone's going to end up discovering that those jobs to be done are much better served by crypto and so that's what i mean by eating trad fives basically the the things that people are trying to get done that they they normally reach for square cash or robin hood eventually they're going to reach for phantom to do that first.

1:42:03Are you happy? Yeah, I'm pretty happy. What makes you happy?

1:42:12Oh, God. I mean, I think, yeah, making huge impact, building something. I think, you know, I've always been a builder and tinkerer and building something that a lot of people use and recognize makes me happy and brings me fulfillment. And yeah, I think being mission-oriented, actually working towards this long-term vision, that makes me happy. Amongst other things. That's all the work-related ones. but what's your biggest prediction for next 24 months oh 24 months

1:43:06well we're gonna see a lot of stable coins come out i think we already see that precipitating i think we're gonna see some interesting downstream effects of that happening i think things are probably going to get quite confusing in the world of stable coins very similar to what happened with l2s i think the valid that the dynamic is very similar where all of these companies and apps got pitched on hey you're going to build your own l2 and you're going to be able to make all this money off of it right now stable coins have kind of taken that role it's like hey company xyz like you're going to release a stable coin and you're gonna you're gonna make all this money off of it right look at look at usdc and circle and then all of a sudden like all these companies are going to start issuing stable coins and it's going to get really confusing so i feel like in the next 24 months you'll probably see all this all these come out and then you'll probably get like this like peak confusion and then probably you'll then end up consolidating to be winners, let's say.

1:44:19So I think that's going to happen. I think we're actually going to finally see the realization of payments enabled by crypto. Well, there's two different types of payments. There's peer-to-peer payments, which we're going to be working really hard to enable, like sort of like the crypto Venmo vision. And then there are crypto user to merchant payments, like actually buying goods and services with crypto. I think that world is finally going to get realized thanks to Stripe. Like that world has traditionally been pretty hard to crack because merchants don't really know what to do with crypto and they don't know how to deal with it.

1:45:10And so you really needed that last leg for someone to be able to convert crypto into like normal fiat for merchants to accept and starts playing that role now with pay with their pay with crypto uh efforts and so i think finally we're going to see that world um come to fruition um so yeah i'd say 20 those are a couple 24 months Thank you so much, Brandon, for doing that. Thank you for spending all your days and sometimes nights to bring this industry further and to be so practical. Sounds simple, but it's so necessary. Like we talked about that before. There's too many people who are, I mean, it's a very tech-driven and developer-driven industry.

1:45:59and there's too many people who still seem to not really understand that users need simplicity. And it's something that you really nailed and the reason why millions of users, me included, use Phantom a lot. So thank you so much for that. You're welcome. Thanks for having me on.