Phantom

Phantom is a self-custody crypto wallet launched in 2021 by a team including former Twitter engineer Brandon Millman. It became the default wallet for the Solana ecosystem by focusing on a clean, friendly interface, and has since expanded into a multichain wallet covering Ethereum, Bitcoin, Base, Polygon and Sui. It runs as a browser extension — most people install it on Chrome — and as a mobile app, letting you hold tokens and NFTs, swap assets and connect to decentralized apps.

One clarification: searches for "phantom wallet" sometimes mix in a physical product, the tactical phantom card wallet sold as an everyday-carry accessory. That is unrelated to this Phantom, which is a software crypto wallet. Install the extension only from phantom.com or your browser's official add-on store — fake "Phantom" extensions exist specifically to capture recovery phrases.

Phantom itself has a clean security record: as a non-custodial wallet it holds no user funds centrally, and there is no verified breach of Phantom's own code that drained users at the wallet level. Your keys are stored on your device, encrypted by your password. It is worth being precise about the August 2022 mass Solana wallet drain, which many people wrongly pin on Phantom. That attack was traced to the Slope wallet, which transmitted users' seed phrases in plaintext to a logging service; because some people had imported the same seed into both apps, Phantom users were among the victims — but Phantom was not the vulnerability. Wallets that never touched Slope were not affected.

As with any self-custody wallet, the real risks now sit with the user. Phishing sites and fake support ask for your recovery phrase (never enter it anywhere); malicious token-approval and blind-signing requests can drain a wallet if you approve without reading; and lookalike extensions try to impersonate the real one. Keep the recovery phrase offline, verify what you are signing, and revoke approvals you no longer need.