Phantom Brings On the Ventuals Team to Deepen Its Hyperliquid Perps Capabilities

Phantom CASH$1.0000.0% has brought on the three co-founders of Ventuals (Alvin Hsia, Emily Hsia, and Aris Samad) as the wallet doubles down on perpetual futures trading. The team starts this week, according to CEO Brandon Millman's announcement on June 30.

What Ventuals Built

Ventuals was a perpetual futures protocol built on Hyperliquid's HIP-3 framework, which lets third-party teams list and manage their own perp markets on the exchange. The team's specific focus was pre-IPO private company valuations: traders could go long or short on names like OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX with up to 10x leverage using USDC, without needing access to private secondary markets.

In roughly six months of operation, Ventuals processed $650 million in cumulative trading volume from more than 11,000 traders, ranking among the top ten RWA perpetual decentralized exchanges by open interest before it wound down on June 15. Phantom's blog put the annualized run rate at over $1 billion.

The founders bring backgrounds from Airbnb, Brex, and Paradigm. At Phantom, they join the trading and data teams.

Phantom's Four Acquisitions in 13 Months

This is Phantom's fourth deal in roughly 13 months. The wallet acquired Bitski in May 2024 to improve account-based onboarding, Blowfish (a transaction security platform) later in 2024, and SimpleHash, a token and blockchain data provider, in early 2025. Each addition targeted a specific layer of the consumer crypto stack: onboarding, security, data, and now trading infrastructure.

The timing follows Phantom's July 2025 launch of native perpetual futures via Hyperliquid, which gave users access to up to 40x leverage and stop-loss/take-profit orders while maintaining non-custodial control. Millman has described wallets, not exchanges, as the coming primary gateway for onchain activity, and the Ventuals hire accelerates that thesis in a product line Phantom only opened a year ago.

Phantom raised $150 million at a $3 billion valuation in January 2025, led by Sequoia Capital and Paradigm, and now counts 20 million users.

How Ventuals' Shutdown Opened the Door for Phantom

Ventuals wound down its standalone markets on June 15, citing consolidation in the HIP-3 operator space. Rather than compete for market share on the exchange layer, Alvin Hsia, Emily Hsia, and Samad's experience building decentralized order books, managing oracle data, and designing perpetuals infrastructure maps directly to what Phantom needs as it expands the product it already has.

As Solana's wallets move toward full-service finance apps, Phantom has covered prediction markets (via a World Prediction Markets integration revealed June 30), tokenized stock trading, and perpetual futures across its user base. The Ventuals team's experience shipping HIP-3 products at scale positions them to accelerate the perpetuals and data infrastructure Phantom is now prioritizing.