Phantom, the largest Solana wallet by market share, announced this week that the team behind Ventuals will be joining the company, weeks after the Hyperliquid-based Perpetual Venue was shut down.
The hires include Ventuals co-founders Alvin Hsia and Emily Hsia, and engineer Aris Samad, Phantom announced on its X account and in a company blog post. This transaction is not a purchase of the company or its products.
Ventuals exited its on-chain pre-IPO trading platform in mid-June, reporting more than $650 million in lifetime trading volume and more than 500,000 trades. $HYPE rose during the run.
The move brings the talent of one of Hyperliquid’s early pre-IPO perpetual builders into consumer wallets, which have been aggressively expanding into derivatives. Phantom added in-wallet perpetual futures trading powered by HyperLiquid in July 2025 and has since expanded into equity and pre-IPO style markets. Hiring the founders of Ventuals gives Phantom the talent to build and operate its own marketplace on Hyperliquid.
$HYPEThe token backing Hyperliquid traded for around $65, down about 2% in 24 hours, roughly matching Bitcoin’s 2.8% decline over the same period, and up about 6% over the past week, according to CoinGecko.
Mr. Phantom did not say what Ventures’ founders would build with the company or whether the hires signaled a pre-IPO or a move toward permanent equity.
A team with a super fluid pedigree
Ventuals described itself as the first on-chain derivatives protocol for private pre-IPO company valuations, where each market tracks a synthetic price rather than a call for shares. Alvin Hsia was the company’s chief executive officer and Emily Hsia was its chief technology officer. Both previously worked at Goldfinch and Airbnb, and previously co-founded a project called Shadow.
The team built the marketplace through Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 framework. This allows external developers to $HYPE stake. Ventuals’ flagship contract allows traders to take leveraged positions on the valuations of OpenAI and Anthropic, neither of which are publicly traded. Upon exit, these markets were frozen and settled at the average price for the following 24 hours, and the team confirmed that no Ventuals tokens existed.
Phantom derivatives push
Phantom is the leading wallet in the Solana ecosystem, with approximately 39% of the Solana wallet market share, 15-20 million monthly active users, and a January 2025 Series C led by Sequoia Capital and Paradigm at a $3 billion valuation. The wallet goes far beyond storage, adding swaps, staking, prediction market features, and from mid-2025, perpetual functionality.
Phantom’s perps product runs on Hyperliquid, and the company announced that its cumulative trading volume exceeded $10 billion within a few months of its launch in July 2025. We have since added permanent equity, which is deployed through HIP-3. The Ventuals founder’s background in developing and operating such markets is directly reflected in its roadmap, but Phantom did not elaborate on the team’s specific role.
