Phantom acquires Solana trading terminal Solsniper

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Phantom has acquired the Solana trading and analytics platform Solsniper, Blockworks has learned exclusively. Phantom declined to disclose the deal terms.

Solsniper is one of a raft of platforms that provide advanced features and tracking tools for memecoin traders. Solsniper’s web app will continue to operate as a standalone platform, and Solsniper’s team, led by co-founder and CEO Max Zhuang, will join Phantom.

While Phantom cut its teeth as a crypto wallet, the acquisition perhaps signals the well-funded platform’s plans to deepen its trading capabilities, especially after Phantom began offering perpetual futures trading by way of Hyperliquid.

Solana’s memecoin craze has been lucrative for token creation platforms like pump.fun and Letsbonk, but it has also been quite profitable for the picks and shovels that facilitate the discovery, tracking and trading of those memecoins.

DEX Screener, which offers popular trending token lists, made $2.9 million in the past month just by charging memecoin projects to update their token information, Solana onchain analyst adam_tehc noted recently.

Over time, popular trading venues have begun integrating these picks and shovels-like services. Jupiter and pump.fun both offer in-house trading terminals. With the Solsniper acquisition, Phantom may be poised to do the same, although it has not yet made announcements on that front.

“We see a wide variety of experience levels in crypto today, from new folks to professional traders. This acquisition helps Phantom provide more advanced tools that grow with the user’s expertise. Solsniper has done a great job of building a platform, and we’re excited to bring Phantom’s distribution and infrastructure into the product,” Phantom head of corporate development Joe Wadcan said.

Sweetening the deal further, Solsniper also offers a Telegram trading bot, which is a popular product among some memecoin traders.

Picks and shovels may be valuable to trading platforms because value often flows to the venues and platforms where users actually are. This is why memecoin industry watchers tend to be bullish on Axiom, which is attempting to win end users while staying agnostic to specific networks or platforms.

By acquiring Solsniper, Phantom could take a segment of its users who currently leave the wallet app to go track, trade, or discover memecoins somewhere else and bring them back in-platform. 

Phantom’s acquisition plans likely will not end with Solsniper.

“As we build the next evolution of Phantom, we expect to aggressively pursue acquisitions to expand our product surface area and build the leading consumer finance platform,” Phantom co-founder and CEO Brandon Millman said in a blog post.

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