Phantom hires Ventuals founders after Hyperliquid perps venue shuts down
Phantom, the largest Solana wallet by market share, has hired Ventuals co-founders Alvin Hsia and Emily Hsia, plus engineer Aris Samad, just weeks after their Hyperliquid-based pre-IPO perpetuals venue shut down. I would not file this under normal recruiting. It reads more like Phantom choosing a lane: derivatives, with pre-IPO and synthetic equity markets sitting near the center of it. Weird market. Big consequences.
Phantom announced the hires on X and in a blog post. It did not buy Ventuals. It did not revive the product. It hired the people behind it, which is the more telling move. Why does that matter? Because the team had already built live markets on Hyperliquid, the same platform Phantom uses for in-wallet perpetual futures. Before shutting down its onchain pre-IPO trading platform in mid-June, Ventuals reported more than $650 million in lifetime trading volume and raised more than 500,000 $HYPE.
Phantom already has the distribution. It holds about 39% of the Solana wallet market and has 15 million to 20 million monthly active users. That is not a niche DeFi front end trying to buy attention on X. The wallet, valued at $3 billion in a January 2025 Series C led by Sequoia Capital and Paradigm, already offers swaps, staking, and prediction markets. Since mid-2025, it has pushed into perpetuals. Its Hyperliquid-powered product passed $10 billion in cumulative trading volume within months of launching in July 2025. My take: hiring a team that has run synthetic private-company markets, including markets tied to OpenAI and Anthropic, fits the map Phantom has been drawing for a while.
Most guides would frame this as “TradFi is coming onchain.” That is only half right. The better read is simpler: Phantom wants the wallet to become the trading surface, not just the place users land after trading somewhere else. Leveraged exposure to private-company valuations is not a casual feature. It is complicated, speculative, and easy to misunderstand. I’ll be honest: that is exactly why the interface matters. If Phantom can put those markets inside a wallet people already open every day, it could reach traders who would never bother with a smaller DeFi app. That matters for Solana too. More trading through Phantom means more activity around SOL, which has already reacted to ecosystem news, including a 12% jump in early March 2025 after a major Solana announcement.
The other piece is talent consolidation. Ventuals was an early onchain derivatives protocol focused on private, pre-IPO company valuations. Its founders shutting it down and joining Phantom suggests the hard part may not be the idea itself. It may be distribution and liquidity. Trust, too. Counter to the usual startup advice, the winning move here may not be staying independent. Building exotic markets from scratch is rough when you also have to persuade users to show up. A wallet with millions of monthly users solves part of that problem immediately. We have seen this pattern before in crypto products: the better primitive does not always win; the better entry point often does.
For traders, the practical change is plain. More advanced markets may appear in the same place they already trade and manage assets. Less tab-hopping. Fewer odd interfaces. Maybe fewer reasons to ignore the product. Is this over-reading one hire announcement? Maybe, but not by much. Around the same time, $HYPE traded near $65, down about 2% over 24 hours and roughly in line with Bitcoin’s 2.8% drop, while still up about 6% for the week.
What this means
Phantom is betting on onchain derivatives, with pre-IPO and equity-style perpetuals likely part of the plan. Hiring the Ventuals team gives it people who have already dealt with the messy operational work behind synthetic markets on Hyperliquid. That could speed up Phantom’s product roadmap and bring more market types into the wallet. Yes, this slightly contradicts the caution above about not over-reading the deal. Bear with me: the hire is not proof of a product launch, but it is a strong clue about product direction. For Solana, the upside is more activity from traders who want more than spot swaps or staking. Watch the volume. The thing to track now is whether Phantom’s perps keep growing, and whether any new equity or pre-IPO contracts get real use after the launch buzz fades.
Investors should watch Phantom’s next product announcements, especially anything that explains what Alvin Hsia, Emily Hsia, and Aris Samad will actually build. New perpetuals markets could affect SOL demand if they bring more transactions and fees into the Solana ecosystem. Hyperliquid still matters here because Phantom’s perps product depends on that infrastructure. $HYPE is worth tracking for that reason, but it is not a clean proxy for Phantom’s success. The cleaner signal is Phantom’s cumulative perps volume, especially if equity or pre-IPO contracts start gaining traction. Major Phantom product updates could move SOL too. In late February 2025, SOL rallied 15% after Phantom announced new staking features.