Phantom Wallet on Ethereum!

Phantom, which is a crypto wallet, is kind of similar to uh MetaMask, kind of in browser, and uh it's been previously on the Solana wallet, and now it is going to be deployed to Ethereum. And I wanted to see it for myself because I have not had any experience actually with Phantom t to date. Does that um that will displease the Soul Maxis? Yeah,

That we're about to get

will also be joining you in that this will be the first time I've seen uh the Phantom Wallet. But from everyone that I know uh in the crypto world uh who goes across all the chains, much more than than you and I have the have the time for, they they say that their favorite thing about Solana is the Phantom Wallet. Uh so now Phantom uh they've announced that they're coming to the Ethereum layer one and also Polygon. Uh and so uh the joy that is Phantom Wallet is about to be able to be experienced by the Ethereum side of things. So, Ryan, I'm happy to have you join me on one of the Dolpha League episodes.

yeah. Am I doing it right? Is this going okay so far?

That's great.

No, I'm super excited, honestly. Like, and this is more than just a conversation. I think we're gonna actually see some live demos here of uh of what's going on, what what Phantom is about to release. Uh guys, before we get into it, want to tell you about another tool that is essential for your bankless journey. That tool is called Opolus. David, tell them about Opolus.

Oplis. Yeah, so there's a bunch of things that we like to do in the world of Web3. We like to work for a DAO, or perhaps we like to be an NFT artist. Things that are confusing to typical nation-state employment structures. Do you how do you manage payroll? How do you manage healthcare? How do you manage your taxes when you are working on the frontier in ways that the nation-state doesn't understand? Well, Opolis is here to help you do what you do best, which is continue to be working on the frontier of Web3, while also being compliant with taxes and also getting healthcare. Opolus is a co-op. And so everyone who is a part of the Opolus ecosystem, they all come together and then Opolis negotiates for better and better healthcare rates and services from uh because of how many people that they have uh in the Opolus co-op, they are able to negotiate healthcare services for their co-op members also because it's a co-op. Uh, if you uh sign up for Opolis, you also become an owner of Opolis. Sounds pretty damn web three to me. Uh and so if you join soon, by the end of this month, by December 31st, you get a thousand work tokens, which is the token of the Opolis Co op, and a thousand bank tokens as well, there is a link in the show notes for you to get started so you can continue pioneering out the frontier with healthcare because the frontier's dangerous.

Alright, that that is important, of course. Independent contractors and crypto, you absolutely need to check this out. Alright, David. Uh do we want to say anything more about Phantom? So um Actually, I I don't know the details in terms of when they're deploying, so I'm hoping to ask that from the Phantom guys. I'm also hopeful to see kind of a demo.

Mm-hmm.

Of what this looks like. Ideally, the demo that's kind of multi-chain, so showing us like Ethereum and Matic. What else should uh viewers pay attention to today? How

Yeah, I think that well, first off, the Ethereum ecosystem could definitely use some competition in the wallet space. Uh MetaMask definitely dominates. Uh Rainbow is definitely growing in market share, but more wallets competing with other wallets is always great. And sounds like Phantom uh is doing uh is entering the ring of competition in the Ethereum ecosystem, uh, which you know competition is great for the consumer. I'm also I also want to ask about uh because like on the MetaMask side of things, there's always like the Infura back end. Uh it's not it is controversial, even though it shouldn't be. Uh, but we will ask about that. Like, how how does transactions get broadcasted? How what is the back end of the Solana wallet as well?

bankless is it? How

Helpfully autonomous.

is it?

Well, guys, we'll be right back with uh Brandon and Francesco from um Francesco from Phantom, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. All right, guys, we are here with a Phantom team to talk about Ethereum's newest wallet. Um, I'm expecting big things from this, guys. No pressure, but I've heard so much about Phantom. Want to kind of see this. Uh, we've got Brandon, who's the COO and co founder, and Francesco, who is the CTO and co founder. Guys, welcome to Bankless.

Yeah, thanks guys. Appreciate it.

Okay, so uh I would say welcome to Ethereum, but you guys are like you've been on Ethereum before, and you've been building on Ethereum previous to Phantom. Uh, can you tell us about that? And like let me be maybe one of the first to say welcome back to Ethereum, if no one's ever said that on a podcast with you. Uh it's great to have Phantom entering the ecosystem. We're very excited. But can you can you tell us about your stories in crypto, how you started Phantom?

Awesome.

Yeah, first of all, thanks so much for having us uh on the show. Uh super exciting to kind of give everyone uh a preview of what's to come from our side uh and what to expect.

And uh yeah, long time, long time listener. So uh pretty surreal to be on here. So appreciate it.

Um cool. Yeah, well I can I can kind of get started, just talk a little bit about you know how we got started, how we how we ended up where we are. Um

Because you guys have some experience like before Phantom. Take us to the before Phantom days and then the story of Phantom.

totally.

So

Francesco, myself, and Chris, who's the third co-founder, we all got our start in crypto around 2017. So if you remember, that's sort of the uh the previous hype cycle, all about ICOs, white papers, sort of Ethereum's come up. Um

and we all got our start at a crypto startup called Zero X, uh, which is a company that develops decentralized exchange technology, um, sort of in the Ethereum DeFi space. And uh, we kind of got our start actually before DeFi was even coined uh as a term.

Yeah, good good times. Um

Didn't Blake coin the term, or someone at Zero X was involved in coining the term DeFi?

yeah, there was like a a bit of um

a story there. There's sort of a like a telegram group or where DeFi was originally coined, and uh we had we have a couple coworkers in that group. Um

but yeah, anyway, so you know that's kind of how we got we got started. Um

And yeah, that was a really different time. It was basically the whole DeFi Web3 space was really emerging from this sort of

primordial goop of the permissionless blockchain.

And everyone was just sort of like, you know, working in their lanes, trying to figure things out. And so the area that we were,

you know, very fortunate to be able to work on was this decentralized exchange area.

And from basically the course of 2017 to 2021, so about four years, we're you know uh doubling down on decentralized exchange and had the uh you know great opportunity to work on a number of pretty widely used um

DAPs uh in the Ethereum space. So uh one of them is called matcha.xyz, which is a DEX aggregator that you may have used or some of the listeners may have used. Uh but basically it's a it's a DAP that helps uh a user get the best price possible for a swap by sort of scanning all the different types of decentralized exchanges out there.

And we also worked on sort of the backend technology for that called Xerox API, which actually

is used to power a number of swap experiences across the entire ecosystem. So

that's kind of where we cut our teeth and where we really got to

get some experience building dApps at scale.

And through that experience, we sort of

uh were able to

Gain a couple of key insights. So the first insight that we gained was that

the wallet is basically the bottleneck of growth for the entire Web3 ecosystem.

So once you start building a DAP and you get to a certain size and you say, hey, let's really start

being diligent about trying to grow the DAP, analyzing growth funnels and all of that,

you end up realizing that every single funnel ends with

sending someone over to MetaMask. So whether that's on the signup flow.

You ask someone to install a wallet, you kind of kick them out to MetaMask and hope

that they return.

And then even on core flows, like even on the swaps, every single flow terminates in a MetaMask pop up and sort of praying that

the wallet is sort of holding up its end of the bargain

and properly guiding the user towards those last steps.

I think not necessarily innovating at the pace that we would like, working at the application layer.

And we decided, hey, like someone needs to kind of step up

and push the competition here. And so that's kind of what just how we decided to

go after Phantom in the first place was through our experience working at Zero X.

Is there any uh part of the wallet ecosystem, the wallet uh uh flow or UX that uh you really identify as like nam, damn, this is really broken. I would like to fix this. This part is not being innovative on. Somebody should do this, maybe we should do it. Was there any any w what what like parts of the wallet world uh do you remember as like the things that you really wanted to target?

Yeah, totally. Well, yeah, like I mentioned before, so there's two main areas. So there's one sort of like signing up for a DAP.