Phantom, the most widely used wallet for coins on Solana (CRYPTO: SOL), just hired a team of developers who ran some of the most high-profile private-company perpetual futures markets on Hyperliquid over the last couple of months. With this, Phantom joins the trend of wallets muscling deeper into leveraged derivatives, and the field is filling fast.
For Solana holders, the temptation here is to read this development as bullish news for buying Solana. But the story is more complicated than that -- and the nuance is what's making me consider buying more Solana -- so let's dive in and see what's actually happening.
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Perpetual futures contracts, or "perps," are derivatives that offer leveraged exposure to the future price of an underlying **** et, with no expiration date.
Phantom's perp product uses Hyperliquid's platform as a back end, which is not a Solana-native venue; the wallet is Hyperliquid's largest distribution partner. The hiring of the developer team deepens that partnership, but it isn't a bid by Solana to build the next Hyperliquid.