Phantom Wallet's Ghost Story: Are Phantom Usernames Better Than ENS?

In the United States, besides celebrating Independence Day on the Fourth of July, the whole country also joyously celebrates the underground national holiday "Halloween" in October, heralding the approach of the new year and signaling the beginning of a heated consumer financial market. Recently, the wallet known as the "Phantom" wallet, aptly nicknamed "little ghost," launched a new feature just in time for the Western Halloween, allowing users to create their own aliases Username.

Before SOL is officially listed on the Coinbase exchange, purchasing and even storing it is troublesome. The widely used Metamask wallet in the crypto community is not compatible with the Solana blockchain. In 2021, the wallet known as Alpha, Phantom, attracted forty thousand users as Beta testers. Users downloaded the Phantom wallet to store Solana tokens on the Chrome browser. Many users found their wallets malfunctioning shortly after use, for unknown reasons. They watched helplessly as their SOL and NFTs disappeared like spirits, and that was the end of it.

Sometimes, the brand name and logo can reveal the brand's positioning. From its name to the logo that resembles a ghost passing by, Phantom hints at its future goal of maintaining the tradition of anonymity in Web 3, continuing privacy, and becoming a cross-chain encrypted wallet.

Founder and Background Story of Phantom

Phantom was co-founded in 2021 by former Twitter engineer Brandon Millman and his former colleague at 0x, Francesco Agosti. In July of the same year, they secured a $9 million investment from the renowned venture capital firm A16z. 0x provides white-label and API packages for development teams. Brandon Millman and Francesco Agosti both served as senior technical leads at 0x, the development team behind the decentralized exchanges Matcha and 0x Protocol. Companies like Coinbase, Metamask, and Zerion utilize 0x's API.

In 2022, Paradigm invested in Phantom at a valuation of $1.2 billion. In 2023, they launched the Crosschain Swapper to facilitate cross-chain transactions using user IDs.

By the end of December 2023, they announced the release of a Bitcoin test version that supports Ordinals NFT collection.

What are Phantom Usernames?

Phantom wallet is a self-custodial wallet where users are responsible for their own funds. Similar to the popular Metamask wallet, users create their wallets on the Chrome web browser and are provided with seed phrases for backup. The upgraded Phantom wallet is said to detect malicious virus attacks.

Phantom allows users to create their own ID names as a way of system identification. Unlike logging into an encrypted wallet using an email or phone number, users can log into Phantom with their self-created usernames. When a user logs in with a self-named ID, the public key signs an anonymous message, which is verified by Phantom's backend system to confirm ownership of the public key. This identification process is known as Phantom Auth, a new encryption verification method. The user ID name is searched in the Phantom backend to verify identity and link to the client side, which could be an exchange or another cryptocurrency wallet.

Phantom Usernames serve as a simplified shortcut, allowing users to send and receive cryptocurrencies and NFTs without the need for long external public keys. Users can conduct transactions using their ID names. The feature is currently in beta, so users don't need to rush to set up their names. It's advisable to observe for a while and see if any issues arise before deciding whether to use it.