When Monad's mainnet went live in November 2025, Phantom was already there. That head-start matters more than most people realize.
New blockchains fail for a reason that has nothing to do with technology. They launch fast, they post impressive benchmarks, and then they wait for users who never show up in the numbers that count. Monad, the high-performance EVM-compatible Layer 1 promising 10,000 transactions per second, had a different November 24, 2025. When its mainnet went live, Phantom Wallet enabled MON airdrop claims the same day, putting Monad into the hands of a user base that already had crypto habits, already trusted the interface, and already knew how to move money across chains.
That's not a small thing. Distribution is the variable that most L1 post-mortems get wrong.
Phantom has spent the last two years becoming something MetaMask never quite managed: a wallet that doesn't feel like a tool. It started as a Solana-native extension but now runs across eight networks including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Base, Polygon, Sui, HyperEVM, and Monad. According to data published by CoinLaw, Phantom hit 22 million users globally and generated roughly $325 million in gross protocol revenue across 2025, up about 60% from the year before. Peak weekly revenue reached $44 million in January 2025. Those aren't numbers you associate with a wallet that Solana maximalists use. They're the numbers of a platform.
Monad crossed $300 million in TVL within weeks of launch and has since stabilized near $410 million in DeFi deposits across lending markets, perpetual exchanges, and stablecoin vaults, according to Everstake's institutional staking report. MON now trades around $0.034 with a fully diluted valuation of roughly $3.5 billion. Those figures would be meaningless without on-ramps, and Phantom is the most important on-ramp Monad has.
Timing was decisive. When a new chain launches and the dominant wallet doesn't support it yet, early adopters are forced through browser configuration steps, manual RPC entries, or workarounds that filter out everyone except the committed. Phantom's day-one Monad support meant a DeFi-native Solana user could hold MON without switching apps, without learning new wallet logic, without any friction at all. That population, people who already understand yield, who already move between chains comfortably, is exactly the cohort Monad needs seeding its early ecosystem. You don't want your first wave of users to be speculators who stumbled in from a CoinGecko page. You want people who actually deploy capital.
Phantom's Monad help page confirms that MON and all Monad-native tokens are supported for buy, sell, receive, and swap, and that Monad is enabled by default for all users. No setup. No manual network add. The chain is just there.
The MetaMask question
Phantom currently holds 39.4% of the Solana wallet market, according to CoinLaw's market share data. MetaMask, by contrast, still claims over 30 million users and an EVM install base that Phantom hasn't matched across the board. But the gap is narrowing in the places that matter most: active traders, DeFi users, people who check their wallet more than once a day.
MetaMask's core problem is that it was built for a single-chain world and retrofitted for everything else. Phantom was built to feel like a consumer product, and that shows in the interface, the spam filtering, the way swaps are surfaced. For the class of user who bounces between Solana yield farms and Ethereum perps, Phantom is simply more pleasant to use. Adding Monad extends that advantage to a chain where MetaMask has no particular claim.
Phantom is explicitly targeting the crypto super-app position, the one wallet that covers every chain a serious user might care about. The Monad integration fits that thesis precisely. It isn't about Monad specifically. It's about the pattern: be present at every high-signal launch, lower the friction for the user who's already inside Phantom, and make switching to another wallet feel unnecessary.
The $150 million Series C Phantom closed at a $3 billion valuation in January 2025, co-led by Sequoia Capital, funded exactly this expansion logic. Eight chains and counting. Phantom processed $493 billion in derivatives trading volume in Q1 2026 alone, according to CoinLaw, which suggests the platform is holding onto users even as they move into more sophisticated financial activity.
Monad still has to earn its ecosystem the hard way: attract developers, sustain TVL, keep the technical promises around throughput. But it started with the one asset new chains almost never have on day one. A trusted wallet already in tens of millions of pockets, with Monad turned on by default.
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