SimpleHash

SimpleHash was a multi-chain NFT and fungible token data API that aggregated blockchain asset data across 80+ networks — serving as backend infrastructure for wallets, marketplaces, and analytics tools — until it was acquired by Phantom in February 2025 and shut down on March 27, 2025.

What SimpleHash Was

Founded in January 2022, SimpleHash positioned itself as the data layer for the multi-chain ecosystem at a time when developers building NFT wallets, portfolio trackers, and marketplaces were struggling to source consistent, normalized metadata across disparate blockchains. Querying NFT ownership, collection floor prices, sales history, and token balances across networks like Ethereum, Solana, and dozens of other chains typically required maintaining separate integrations with each chain's RPC nodes, marketplace indexers, and metadata standards. SimpleHash collapsed that complexity into a single unified REST API.

Core Products and Capabilities

The platform's core value proposition was breadth combined with reliability. At launch it targeted NFT data, building out indexing for ERC-721 and ERC-1155 tokens on Ethereum and expanding outward. Over time it added:

• NFT data: collection metadata, per-token attributes, rarity scores, sales history, floor prices, active listings, and bids sourced from all major NFT marketplaces
• Fungible token data: real-time prices via DEX aggregation, wallet token balances, historical OHLC price data, and liquidity metrics
• Streaming infrastructure: webhooks and Kafka streaming for applications requiring low-latency data feeds rather than polling
• Spam detection: automated spam scores to help wallets and marketplaces filter airdropped junk tokens and NFTs
• Media handling: cached and dynamically resized NFT media previews with blurhash placeholders, solving the perennial problem of broken or slow-loading on-chain media

The platform covered 80+ blockchains and their testnets by the time of shutdown, including Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin (Ordinals), Base, Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, Tezos, Sui, Mantle, and many others. Solana support encompassed both SPL tokens and Solana-native NFT collections, making SimpleHash one of the few cross-chain APIs to treat Solana as a first-class citizen alongside EVM chains.

Developer Adoption and Customers

SimpleHash found traction with a notable set of clients. Its customer list included Coinbase, Phantom, Ledger, Brave, Rainbow, OpenSea, Zerion, and Nansen — companies whose combined user base represented a significant fraction of the crypto retail market. For these organizations, SimpleHash replaced custom in-house indexers that would otherwise require dedicated engineering headcount to maintain across every chain. The company estimated that using its API could save development teams approximately one million dollars annually in engineering and infrastructure costs versus building equivalent indexing in-house.

Funding

SimpleHash was backed by Y Combinator, Coinbase Ventures, OpenSea Ventures, FCVC, Outset, and Caffeinated Capital. Financial terms of its funding rounds were not publicly disclosed, but the YC batch participation and Coinbase Ventures backing placed it in the top tier of blockchain infrastructure startups.

Late 2024 Expansion into Token Data

In its final months of independent operation, SimpleHash expanded aggressively into fungible token data beyond its original NFT focus. Key releases included a Postgres-based managed database for real-time token pricing (November 2024), EVM token swap parsing with Uniswap v3 integration (December 2024), liquidity and bonding curve metrics for emerging token markets (January 2025), and Sui L1 and Mantle L2 integrations (late 2024 to early 2025). This push suggested the company was repositioning as a broader DeFi data layer — making the acquisition shortly after all the more notable.

Acquisition by Phantom and Shutdown

On February 26, 2025, Phantom announced it had acquired SimpleHash for an undisclosed sum. Phantom, valued at approximately 3 billion dollars at the time, cited the deal as a means of bringing best-in-class real-time token and NFT data capabilities directly into its wallet product. CEO Brandon Millman stated: "By bringing on SimpleHash, we're ensuring that Phantom users have the most accurate and comprehensive token data."

The acquisition was Phantom's third in under a year — following purchases of Blowfish, a transaction security firm, in November 2024, and Bitski, an NFT infrastructure company, in May 2024. The pattern reflected Phantom's strategy of acquiring specialized data and security infrastructure teams rather than building those capabilities from scratch.

SimpleHash services were shut down on March 27, 2025, approximately one month after the announcement. All SimpleHash employees joined Phantom, and the standalone API product was discontinued, with customers directed to migrate to alternative providers.

Impact on Developers

The abrupt shutdown triggered a migration wave across the developer ecosystem. Multiple alternative API providers — including Alchemy and Goldsky — published migration guides specifically targeting former SimpleHash customers, reflecting the scale of its adoption. For Solana-focused developers, losing SimpleHash's unified API meant finding alternative sources for cross-chain portfolio data, NFT metadata, and token balance queries that had previously been accessible through a single integration.

Legacy

SimpleHash's three-year run from founding to acquisition illustrated both the demand for multi-chain data infrastructure and the difficulty of building a durable standalone business in that segment. The company attracted top-tier customers and investors, expanded to 80+ chains, and built a product that prominent crypto applications trusted for production data — but the infrastructure layer it occupied proved more valuable as an acquisition target than as an independent service. Its technology and team live on inside Phantom's product, serving millions of wallet users.