There’s a new, albeit surprising, best cryptocurrency app in town.
Despite the Ethereum ETF approval, Coinbase has seen little movement in U.S. app stores since the March rally. The popular exchange’s mobile service broke out of the top 50 free apps in early March, just before Bitcoin reached new highs, but then fell as market euphoria faded and inflation concerns calmed markets. Since April, the Coinbase app has tended to maintain its ranking between 300 and 200, and has been showing some slow growth since dropping to 396 on May 12.
Enter Phantom. This app is a cryptocurrency wallet that has established its name by becoming one of the most prominent apps. Solana brush
+0.34%
Wallet, but we have now expanded our product to include: Ethereum, Polygon, Bitcoin.
It is unusual for a wallet to become this popular, in this case more popular than major cryptocurrency exchanges. For example, we have yet to see Metamask, one of the most well-known cryptocurrency wallets, breach the top 500 free apps in the past three months.
However, Phantom naturally improves Solana compatibility. The mobile version of the wallet broke the top 500 for the first time in early March, when the cryptocurrency rally was at its most active and the Solana Memecoin ecosystem was receiving a lot of attention. As for the more niche Solana memecoin, it has been impossible to trade it because it is not listed on exchanges like Coinbase. This needed to be done on the underlying DEX, which Phantom helped people access.
Phantom dropped out of the top 500 free apps in mid-April. This is similar to Coinbase’s decline in ranking.
But suddenly the app gained unprecedented levels of popularity. It entered the top 100 on May 18th, and recently broke into the top 50. It also holds a dominant position in the Utilities category and is categorized for Apple (as opposed to finance like Coinbase). And in the U.S. Google Play Store, it jumped to second place in the finance category, surpassing PayPal. (Editor’s note: Phantom has risen to the top of this category since this newsletter was published.)
It’s unclear whether this explosive growth is sustainable or truly organic. Despite the hype surrounding the Ethereum ETF reigniting the market, the Solana ecosystem is still not seeing the same level of excitement as it did in March.
But App Store rankings aren’t everything when it comes to new downloads. It’s also about user retention, reviews, ratings and many other factors. This doesn’t seem like an easy system to game, as simply purchasing app downloads doesn’t move the needle much, but it does give developers more control over things like app update frequency and language localization compared to actual app consumers.
Retention of original downloaders during the Memecoin craze may have helped Phantom enter the mainstream and secure the app’s ranking. The platform boasted about 7 million monthly active users across both its browser extension and mobile app, which isn’t far from the 8 million monthly trading users Coinbase reported in its first-quarter earnings.
This is an excerpt from The Block’s Data & Insights newsletter. Dive into the numbers that make up the most thought-provoking trends in your industry.
Disclaimer: The Block is an independent media outlet delivering news, research and data. As of November 2023, Foresight Ventures is a majority investor in The Block. Foresight Ventures invests in other companies in the cryptocurrency space. Cryptocurrency exchange Bitget is an anchor LP of Foresight Ventures. The Block continues to operate independently to provide objective, impactful and timely information about the cryptocurrency industry. Below are our current financial disclosures.
© 2023 The Block. All rights reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not provided or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial or other advice.