Paradigm Invests in Solana Wallet Phantom at $1.2 Billion Valuation

With the larger market heading for a recovery, one of the top gainers in the top 10 coins by market cap was Solana noting 17.16% daily gains and 19.01% weekly gains.

The recent Solana gains, however, weren’t singularly fueled by Bitcoin gains and the broader market trajectory, in fact, Solana’s ecosystem-centric developments and collaborations have been key to the surge in price. 

Interestingly, SOL’s recent gains aligned with Phantom’s announcement that it has raised$109 million in Series B funding led by investment firm Paradigm to raise its valuation to $1.2 billion.

Phantom is one of the premier wallet apps for the Solana ecosystem and after the funding announcement on Monday the wallet generated decent social media attention. 

Solana Ecosystem Blooming but Here’s the Catch

In terms of development Solana’s ecosystem appeared to be blooming. On January 31, the co-founder of Solana Labs Anatoly Yakovenko shared that the growth graph in terms of development is seen in the rise in the number of unique programs used. 

Gm developoooooors! pic.twitter.com/kndEXgNTXx

— anat◎ly 🦀🤿🏒 🤙 (@aeyakovenko) January 31, 2022

The latest announcement by the Phantom team further added that the wallet will be made available only to Apple iOS users initially while the Android version would be ‘coming shortly,’ the team stated.  

The wallet can be downloaded as an add-on to popular browsers and is compatible with browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Brave, and Edge. Solana’s Phantom wallet is a direct competitor of Ethereum’s wallet MetaMask which achieved the 21 million users mark by the end of last year.

Fresh data highlights that Phantom users have doubled in a month with 2.1 million users currently as the wallet is consistently onboarding about 100,000 users per week according to CEO Brandon Millman.

That said, the Solana-based DeFi protocol Hubble saw its mainnet launch on January 31. Two weeks ago, Hubble Protocol raised $10 million in funding and the capital was said to be used to expand the project’s team and DeFi project offerings.

SOL Price Rallies

In tandem with the recent ecosystem-centric developments, and the relative stability in Bitcoin’s price and the larger market Solana’s price has picked up the pace. After spending more than a week under the $100 mark Solana was back above the crucial resistance. 

For now, with Solana gaining price momentum if the market continues to remain stable price could see a decent pump in the near term.

It’s worth noting that over the last year, SOL saw a yearly ROI vs USD of +2195.96%. That said, the 7th ranked coin by market cap was still down 59.07% from its all-time high of $258.93 made in early November last year. 

However, Solana has had four network outages over the months and the same has affected the altcoin’s social narrative and subsequently the price action.