Ep. 539 Phantom Wallet: The Friendly Multi Chain Wallet

May 25, 2023 #CRYPTO101

In this episode of Crypto 101 we talk to Phantom Wallet which is a timely conversation after the news of Ledger wallet came out last week. Now more than ever education in understanding crypto storage is paramount. Phantom Wallet brings the ability to work on Ethereum, Solana, and Polkadot and is a non-custodial multi-chain wallet. The team is constantly innovating and has a great Twitter to follow so give them a follow and enjoy the show!

— TRANSCRIPT —

SPEAKERS

Bryce Paul, Brandon Millman

Bryce Paul 00:09

All right, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the crypto 101 Podcast. I am your host, Bryce Paul. And today I’m joined by Brandon Millman from phantom wallet, who’s the CEO and co founder. Brandon, how are you doing today?

Brandon Millman 00:23

Hey, Bryson. Good. Thanks for having me on. How are you? Doing?

Bryce Paul 00:27

Very good. You know, we got a little bit of a little cloud cover here in San Diego things have been kind of wetter than normal. US, but you know, it’s, it’s, it’s a good day to be a crypto holder in light of everything going on in the world. So yeah, we’re really excited to learn about the what you’ve been building at Phantom, a wallet that, you know, I’ve used for Solana, I’ve interacted with a lot of daps through it, and it’s got a really clean interface. You guys take security extremely seriously. And you’ve got a great communications team. Whenever there is, you know, craziness that goes on in the salon ecosystem. You guys are always out there giving great coverage. And so yeah, great actors in the ecosystem. And we’re excited to hear the the founding story and what builds what drives you as builders. So with that, yeah, I’d love to just hear a little bit about your background and how you found yourself starting like a crypto wallet, like how does somebody just come into that?

Brandon Millman 01:26

Yeah, awesome. Yeah. Well, first of all, thanks for all the kind words about Phantom, and yeah, everything that we do, you know, beyond the walls of the application in areas like communication and whatnot. Yeah, we’ve really, through the past couple of years, sort of acted as almost the front end of the Solana network itself.

Bryce Paul 01:53

That’s literally how I think of you guys. Yeah, you guys. Metamask. I mean, if I don’t know if that’s a crude analogy, but you’re the Metamask of Solana basically.

Brandon Millman 02:03

Yeah, I’d say that’s, you know, that’s a fair comparison. And, you know, without responsibility or what that position comes a lot of responsibilities, including, like acting as, like, first line of defense for any kind of issues or communicating problems going on. And so, yeah, you know, just thanks for the kind words, there’s something something that we we take and act on very deliberately so.

Bryce Paul 02:29

Yeah, you could tell that you guys you definitely you know, you guys pride yourself on on you know, your involvement with the community and your guys’s Twitter whoever’s leading that I don’t know if it’s you, or if you got somebody for that, but whoever is listening right now should go follow the, the Phantom wallet, Twitter because they’re pretty active. And this is where I get all my updates from, and I know you guys got active discord and all that kind of stuff, too. Yeah. Yeah. So. So tell us about Yeah, how you kind of decided, like, you know, I’m going to start a crypto wallet. The world needs what I’m building.

Brandon Millman 03:02

Yeah, so, um, you know, I got my start in crypto back in 2017, which was sort of the, the height of the last, you know, Bull Run or like, kind of like a hype cycle. Back in 2017. A lot of white papers, ICOs Aetherium, was first coming onto the scene in a big way back then. Prior to that, I spent a little over four years working as a software engineer at Twitter actually. So did sort of my, you know, Silicon Valley tour of duty there, so to speak, wanted to dive into something completely different. And then started working in the crypto industry in 2017. At this small startup called 0x, which is still around they now kind of Right, exactly, yeah. So. So I used to work on the back end of Moto which is a product called Xerox API, which is a swapping API that helps aggregate decentralized exchanges on EVM networks. And yeah, basically spent a number of years doing a deep dive there. I have two other co founders, we all met each other and worked with one another at Xerox. When my co founders, Chris, he was the general manager of the module project, and was responsible for sort of bringing it to market initially. And so while we were while we were doing that, from 2017 to 2020, or so, beginning of 2021, we basically became power users of Metamask, both from a user perspective, but also from a developer perspective. And yeah, we felt like There’s a number of different things that the wallet layer could be doing to really help kind of grease the wheels for the entire ecosystem and just help unlock growth for everyone. And if you think about it, the wallet really is in the way that it kind of like 2017 and prior like exchanges like Coinbase and others are really acted as like the first touch point or on ramp for for users. In the current iteration of crypto or a lot of people are trying to use applications like uniswap and open sea or magic Eden as as sort of their first forays into crypto wallets are kind of increasingly acting as that first touch point, or like top of the funnel for the ecosystem. And yeah, we really felt that the current wallet space was really kind of not really doing the best it could to make sure that the top of the funnel at first touch point was the best possible. And so yeah, while we’re back at 0x, we felt like hey, no better way to kind of like leverage our skill sets and help grow the entire ecosystem and to work on the wallet space. And we also felt like working in theory him for a while, that it was pretty clear that the space need to make a number of big strides in scalability and usability of of the underlying blockchain platforms, and that it was very likely going to be we’re very likely entering an era of experimentation. And yeah, just general. Yeah. Experimentally, it’s

Bryce Paul 06:56

also important to note that you guys were like, really early on the Solana dev train. You guys didn’t like pico top, you know, launch your product when Solana is $300 like you guys were like the core infrastructure that like led to and like enabled the run up of Solana defy like, you know?

Brandon Millman 07:13

Yeah, yeah. In parts. So we made that call, probably pretty early on at the end of 2020. Beginning of 2021. Yeah. To choose Solana as our horse.

Bryce Paul 07:26

Do you remember, like the earliest kind of prices that you were like, remember? Like, oh, like we launched it at like around $1, per Solana or anything like that?

Brandon Millman 07:35

Yeah, I can’t remember the I think I remember

Bryce Paul 07:37

Sam’s infamous. You know, I’ll buy all the Solana you want it? $3? And then fuck off? I think that was like January 21, or something?

Brandon Millman 07:45

Yeah, I think the first time we’re really looking at it was looked at the end of 2020, where it was like around like $2, or something like, that’s pretty

Bryce Paul 07:54

crazy. You guys had a lot of conviction.

Brandon Millman 07:57

Different times. Yeah, we have a lot of conviction for a number of different reasons. But really, we felt like the network and the wallet are very have a very symbiotic relationship and actually can really help the wallet can really help spur growth and ecosystem and vice versa. And so yeah, we really want to choose a network and a team and community where we could really help work together with them to grow the community. So that’s how we got started.

Bryce Paul 08:30

Yes. So it’s really fascinating just how you guys came to the conclusion that Solana was really the the architecture that you wanted to build on Aetherium was plagued by a lot of these scaling issues. And you know, one of the reasons that I think wallets are so cool, is because to me, they’re the place where the user actually interacts with the blockchain. It’s kind of like the web browser of the internet, like the internet’s like all this data and stuff, but like it’s really undecipherable, unless you could have a user interface to like interpret it. And I think that’s what you know, wallets do. It’s like, it takes your private keys and assigns the public keys, and then like, it does all this really boring stuff. But it’s like the core infrastructure. And so making that as usable and friendly and like the experience there, like is similar to, you know, how the web browsers kind of developed, would you say that’s kind of like a fair analogy?

Brandon Millman 09:25

Yeah, that’s right. I’d say that’s right. And somewhat similarly to the early internet. We’re still very much in the early innings of blockchain ecosystems and technologies. And yeah, there’s a lot to be figured out still.

Bryce Paul 09:40

Yeah. In when you kind of like, look at your competition in the Solana space, like, where do you like where do you typically compete with people? Is it on fees? Is it on, you know, user experience, like where’s the competition that you kind of see in the market for wallets

Brandon Millman 10:00

Yeah, that’s a good question. In general, across many ecosystems, I’d say the competition has been primarily on user experience, and providing access to applications that people want to use. And so you typically see different wallets spinning up for different ecosystems. So you’ll have a wallet that specifically for the cosmos ecosystem, and goes really, really deep their wallets for Solana wallets for polka dot, etc. And so yeah, I’d say predominantly, predominantly, wallets are competing on user experience, but also access to different ecosystems.

Bryce Paul 10:43

Nice. And would you say that, you know, you’re kind of laser focus on Solana and just kind of being focused only there in the early days? And I think maybe even still to this day, I’ll check in on that. But was that really what attribute Id like that first million users because you guys got a million users like, super, super quick, like you guys growth hack that somehow and I’m just curious about that story?

Brandon Millman 11:07

Huh? Well, yeah, like I was saying earlier, I’d say the relationship between the wall and the ecosystem is very symbiotic. And both of them need to be in place in order for the ecosystem to really grow. And yeah, like, like you said, you know, the wallets are sort of like the new browsers of the internet. And they the wallets are actually the point where users and developers actually meet, you know, very concretely, and users and developers make up the two most core parts of an ecosystem. And if you can make sure that the interaction between developers and users is as smooth and as frictionless as possible, you can really unlock growth for the entire ecosystem. And so basically, we got the first million users very quickly by just making sure that we were basically enabling a safe and easy to use experience for NF Ts, specifically on Solana. And that’s really what was sort of the initial growth wave that we we both wrote and helped enable late 2021.

Bryce Paul 12:24

Yeah, kind of, you know, dovetailing off that point, do you guys see more activity with NF T’s through your wallet or with like other defy tokens and just like pure transactions?

Brandon Millman 12:36

Yeah. Nf T’s 100%. I’d say that’s probably true of the entire market currently is vast majority of activity. Just from a transactional vault, like a number of transactions, a number of users standpoint, is is NFT. related. Maybe from a defy standpoint, the actual volumes are larger, you may have more millions of dollars a day, transacted through defy rails than by NFT. Rails, but from a from a number of transact, like absolute number of transactions and users. It’s definitely dominated by it. And FTS, both and Solana let’s say in the broader market,

Bryce Paul 13:19

that makes sense. What’s the appeal of NF T’s in your mind? I mean, I know everybody’s got their own case for them. Do you have any thesis on NF T’s? Are you your bull bear?

Brandon Millman 13:33

Yeah, no, definitely bullish on NF T’s? I’d say, you know, at the core NF T’s are they are very unopinionated building block that developers can use to create number of different experiences. And from that, like programmability a number of interesting use cases have emerged so far. So one is obviously the the profile pictures phenomenon. I think that’s it’s super interesting. And it actually makes a lot of sense to me. In a world where basically our lives are becoming more and more digital and and increasingly online. We’re increasingly living a larger percentage of our lives in the internet or quote unquote Metaverse or whatever we want to call it, it makes sense to have a digital asset that has scarcity and has Yeah, some some sort of ability to, to prove it’s like provenance and things like that in a digital format, whereas typically, people would have done that with things like designer bags or watches or whatnot and in real life. So yeah, we’re really bullish on on profile pictures and what it means for basically like, luxury goods and sort of like signaling and things like that. In a digital sphere, and so yeah, I think that the use case, honestly, it although it feels like sometimes it’s over overdone and overplayed, I think it definitely has like long standing standing legs.

Bryce Paul 15:11

Yeah, they say the next big thing often looks like a toy. Like, that’s kind of, you know, you know, everybody’s fading these NF T’s because it just looks like a toy. But, you know, people oftentimes now spend more of their waking hours online as a digital persona, or they’re, you know, identified with their, their digital self, as opposed to like, really their, their physical self. And, you know, we had all sorts of different books and science fiction and stuff that has talked about this Ready Player, one Snow Crash, like a bunch of this stuff that is very foretelling for kind of where we’re at and where we’re headed. So I think, yeah, NFT profile pictures, although I don’t really have one yet. I haven’t found a community that I identify with. But you know, I got a lot of friends in the ecosystem that are trying to sway me one way or another. Do you have any, like ecosystems or communities that you think are are interesting, or they’ve done something different?

Brandon Millman 16:12

Yeah, that’s a good question. So yeah, I’m definitely very partial to ZooKeys. I have Mizuki profile picture. I mentioned my time at 0x. The founder of ZooKeys is a longtime friend of mine, and coworker at Xerox as well. And yeah, I love that they’re basically going very deep into like the basically the luxury brand angle of it, which I think makes a lot of sense for the format. And then they’re doing a lot of really cool things with bridging the gap between physical items, and NF t. So they did sort of like this really cool. Like hoodie drop that where the hoodie actually has like an NFC patch, that you can, you can like scan and get like virtual representation of the hoodie. And on their website, you could actually combine your Suzuki and digital hoodie and change, actually wear it on your profile picture and make it your avatar. I think there’s a lot of really interesting crossover there.

Bryce Paul 17:20

Yeah, in the Phantom wallet, are you kind of developing like, you know, if we take a look at your roadmap, and like, you know how you guys are looking to cater to customers? Did you guys, you know, plan to develop a bunch of NFT functionality and customization ability in there? Or what’s that look like?

Brandon Millman 17:37

Yeah, totally. So yeah, definitely NFT being the best wallet for NF T’s and NFC power users is definitely where we think one of our strengths lies and definitely an area that we want to keep pushing the envelope. And so yeah, right now, we actually do have quite a bit of really awesome NFC functionality for users. So first of all, you can see your NF Ts, which is feels funny to say that as a differentiator, but not all wallets out there have even the ability to view your NF Ts. So we make sure that you can view your NF Ts in a very fast and easy way. And that’s actually not always an easy thing to do. Delivering images and videos and everything quickly. And then on top of that, we have a lot of customization things you can give yourself a profile picture in the wallet to help identify different accounts based on your NF T’s. You can quickly search through your NF T’s, pin them to your top of your collection. So it’s sort of like curate your, what your portfolio looks like. And then on top of that we also have we’re also doing deeper integrations with external marketplaces. So instead of having to leave the wallet and interact with a site like magic eaten, you can actually sell your NF T’s directly onto that platform from within the wallet. And we’re going to we’re going to be doing a lot more there in terms of like bringing those like kind of like primary actions into the wallet. And then another big area where we spent a lot of time is actually working on the problem of NFT spam and anti spam is actually a huge issue. Especially in lower fee environments like Solana polygon, etc. Basically, you can think about your your wallet as an email inbox, where anyone can permission lessly send you things to your wallet. And you know, it’s that permissionless nature that makes it so amazing, but it also is a vector attack vector for scamming and spamming so you often see these NF T’s come to your wallet that are basically designed to co design to coerce you into a scam where either the image has some instructions on it, or the description has some instructions, it’s meant to take you to a website, a website then tries to basically shake you down for crypto or whatnot. And so we’ve done a lot of work. Again, bring it back to the email analogy, creating sort of spam filters, reporting systems and things like that, to make sure that, you know, your wallet is as free of those

Bryce Paul 20:27

attacks. Yeah, I think that right there. You know, I want to encourage you guys just as a community member, you know, who looks at a lot of this NF T stuff going on. And I just see, day after day, somebody’s clicking a phishing link, and they’re saying, Oh, my whole wallet got drained. It’s like, what the fuck, like, that’s actually pretty nuts. You know, there’s like, all these people that are clicking these links, that they’re signing these transactions that aren’t human readable. They’re just hex code and stuff. And so they sign a transaction. And then they didn’t even know that that meant that, you know, they give control of their keys up to whoever they assigned it to. And, you know, so the scam artists are getting so good. And you know, it’s now kind of like you said, it’s the onus is on the developers and the wall, you guys are the experts. You guys know, the scams, you guys see him coming? You guys have the ability to, you know, do the spam prevention methods. And like back, like you mentioned, spam mail used to be a horrible experience, like people would not use, you know, mail.com or email.com, because there was no, you know, spam filters, and everybody loved Gmail, because it was so good. And with AI, and with technology and stuff that was going on in the back end, in the early days, you’re able to actually get rid of spam, so they get gain market share. So I you know, to your point, the first wallet that gives people this spam filter, very clearly human readable instructions and actions on every signature. I mean, that’s gonna be what what puts people over the edge? For sure.

Brandon Millman 21:51

Definitely. Yeah. So we’ve definitely invested in both of those areas, both spam prevention, scam prevention and human readable transactions. And yeah, I think, you know, basically, crypto and web three has a humongous retention problem right now, everyone, everyone talks about trying, how are we going to like stuff the next billion users in here. And when I think about growth of an ecosystem, it’s not not only the number of new users you can bring in, but also the number of users that you can retain. And, yeah, I mean, I think that you often don’t really hear about all these cases of people getting scammed and things like that. They’re often too embarrassed to actually report anything or whatever. And then they ended up just just leaving, and you only really hear about, like, these high profile hacks, which is honestly not there. They’re obviously a huge problem and all that. But there’s, there’s so many, so many smaller people who are who are just, you know, not saying anything, and just leaving and so, yeah, safety, spam prevention, that’s something that we’re is a huge thing that we’re working on. Yeah, it’s

Bryce Paul 23:01

like, people come into crypto, you know, fully understanding the volatility, and like that nature, but not necessarily like the fact like, oh, I might just one day click a bad link and lose all my money, like, you know, so fixing that is definitely like you said, gonna help the retention. And one other thing I think is going to help the retention is something that you guys are working towards, which is cross chain compatibility. And I think I actually mentioned in the podcast earlier, I was under the perception that it was Solana only. But I then realized quickly, just the very first thing on your guys’s site says, you know, we just launched our salon, or Aetherium, and our polygon network. And so I think, you know, multi chain is definitely going to be the future but making it feel like it’s not multi chain, like making that a unified experience. And so, what was your guys’s kind of thought process behind going multi chain?

Brandon Millman 23:54

Yeah, so basically, the way I view our mandate is to help make web three and crypto as safe and easy to use as possible. And the fact is that people, they love to use applications, a number of different applications across a number of different networks. Not only is there uniswap and open sea, on the theory side, there’s also sites like magic eat in tensor Jupiter, etc. On the sauna side that people love to use. And there’s a lot of very common elements between using applications on both those networks, a lot of lessons that we’ve learned around spam and scam prevention on Solana that can be brought to Aetherium. And that wallets on the theorem side are not doing. And so yeah, basically. And I think that it is possible to have a unified experience or you can dynamically use any of these sites without even really having to think about how they’re implemented from a technical perspective. And so Yeah, that was the idea there. It’s just yeah helped bring a lot, you know, a lot of lessons that we’ve learned from the slot site over to theorem side and also give people who are using uniswap and open sea and Aquila equivalently safe and easy to use experience. Yeah,

Bryce Paul 25:14

awesome. does. Does phantom support Bitcoin or lightning?

Brandon Millman 25:20

Not at the moment, but it’s actually something that we are actively looking at as well. I’m a lot of Bitcoin fans internally on the team as well. The one thing there is that Bitcoin and lightning does not have as well of a developed sort of like dapped, or like web three app ecosystem, there’s nothing built on it. Yeah. And so are our strengths are in specifically that kind of like those types of interactions, and NFT, specifically. So when we think about playing to our strengths, we think about different ecosystems that have those types of

Bryce Paul 25:58

things, maybe the whole ordinal craze, you never know. Yeah,

Brandon Millman 26:02

that’s true. That’s something we’re keeping an eye on as well. But, you know, it’s definitely the whole game of being in crypto is is all about separating signal from noise. And like, yeah, like having a number of convicted bets that you are staying the course and versus like, jumping from trend to trend. So we’re trying to figure that’s part of the game that we’re playing to, and we’re just trying to figure that out. But to your original question, yeah, Bitcoin lightning, definitely super interesting. And then we’re keeping an eye on. Awesome. And then

Bryce Paul 26:33

kind of like rounding out the conversation I just wanted to ask, just like over the course of 2022, obviously, we had a series of like, really, it was a bad year, like most coins were down 70 80%, most users packed it up. We had like two of the largest scale liquidation events in crypto history with Luna Terra going down and then FTX going down. And there was a lot of fallout, it was a really ugly time. And so, you know, we got lots of founders and CEOs that come on the show. And I always like to just kind of ask them or get their sense of, you know, what was going on in your mind during, you know, the FTX crisis? And like, how were you guys navigating it? And did you notice, like any of your, your usage statistics? were, you know, anomalous or anything during that period?

Brandon Millman 27:23

Yeah, that’s a good question. Honestly, it’s, it’s frankly, very embarrassing. And, yeah, it just, I think it feels me to help build crypto back better. And do our part to really help, like repair the reputation and show people you know, what crypto can really be used for. And some of that isn’t some of that original vision behind bitcoin, white paper and things like that, which are also is also become more and more relevant with the situation’s going on and like the normal financial ecosystem. And so in terms of activity, interestingly, Solana is very close to the blast radius of FTX. And, and that ecosystem, interestingly, we’ve definitely seen Solana like come back and very strong. I think there’s a bit of a lull at the end of last year, which coincided with what FTX but also holidays and things like that. But yeah, I’m actually really pleased at how Solana specifically has been able to bounce back this year, also kind of off the back of continuing NFT trends and things like that. And so yeah, just want to end Solana and Aetherium, I think remained very healthy,

Bryce Paul 28:58

from like a developer, and you should kind of metric

Brandon Millman 29:02

Yeah, from a developer. And there’s actually a16z came out with a very interesting report, which I suggest you check out called like the a16z. Crypto index, or the state of crypto index, I think it’s called. And basically it’s like a it’s like an interactive website with a bunch of different dashboards that they’re they’re updating, I think, on a monthly or weekly basis that just shows like The continuing rise in activity of crypto both from a user perspective, but also developer perspective, looking at a number of different metrics like GitHub activity and things like that, which are like leading indicators for healthy ecosystems. So yeah, really pleased how everything has bounced back, but I think also found a renewed sense of focus around trying to make sure that we’re building crypto back in a better way.

Bryce Paul 29:56

Yeah, no. Just checked out this site. Yeah, a 16. ZE crypto.com/state of crypto, that’s a great shout out that is something that I have not seen yet. And looks like they got a lot of great data. So appreciate that share. And yeah, Brandon, this was a killer conversation. I hope we can have you guys back on again here soon. One one last question that I like to ask every person that comes on the show just to you know, help us, you know, maybe see who the next hot thing is going to be or whatever. But, you know, is there one other company out there that, you know, maybe not invested in or not, like affiliated with, but that you look at and you admire, and you think, you know, they’re going to do something big, they’re going to be a big part of the ecosystem. They’re driving our space forward? Any shoutouts?

Brandon Millman 30:43

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think a couple of cool ones, I’d say shout out to helium. So helium, is sort of this like, IoT device, decentralized, wireless network that is supposed to be a challenger to traditional mobile carriers, like Verizon, ATT, etc. I think they’re doing some really cool stuff that’s really pushing the boundaries between, you know, digital and physical worlds. And so that’s really awesome. They also are a big launch partner with Solana mobile. I think the Solana mobile phone is also a really cool, interesting initiative. And the reason why I think it’s an interesting initiative, is that not that i think i To be clear, I don’t think Solana mobile is going to be a commercial success. And if you look, look at it under that lens, it’s going to easy to write it off. But Solana mobile is really and this is one of the things why we got attracted to the Solana team and salami ecosystem in the first place is basically this show by doing and not just telling mentality, or it’s like, hey, crypto on, on mobile can be so much better and so much easier to use. Let’s stop just talking about and theorycrafting about and actually put something in people’s hands and experience it. And then that moment can actually be used to then help push other like mobile phone carriers in the right direction. And so really excited for for Solana mobile, and

Bryce Paul 32:29

it’s gonna come from that. No, those are some awesome shout outs. And I actually just just interviewed Emmett Hollier from Solana mobile. I think the phone that they’re developing is called the saga. Yeah. And they’re rolling it out, you know, so it’s cool that he seemed really excited, you know, and the ex Google Pixel guy and really smart so I think they got the right team over there to make make some big moves. Brandon, this was awesome. Thank you so much for coming on to the crypto one on one podcast. And like I said, I hope we have you back on again when there’s some more cool updates with phantom wallet.

Brandon Millman 33:00

Awesome. Thank you Bryce.

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