Phantom Hires Ventuals Founders After Hyperliquid Perps Venue Winds Down

Phantom, the largest Solana wallet by market share, said the team behind Ventuals is joining the company this week, weeks after the Hyperliquid-based perpetuals venue shut down.

The hires are Ventuals co-founders Alvin Hsia and Emily Hsia, along with engineer Aris Samad, Phantom said in an announcement on its X account and a company blog post. The deal is not a purchase of the company or its product.

Ventuals wound down its onchain pre-IPO trading platform in mid-June, reporting more than $650 million in lifetime trading volume and over 500,000 HYPE raised across its run.

The move folds talent from one of Hyperliquid's earliest pre-IPO perpetuals builders into a consumer wallet that has been expanding aggressively into derivatives. Phantom added in-wallet perpetual futures, powered by Hyperliquid, in July 2025, and has since extended into equity and pre-IPO-style markets. Hiring the Ventuals founders gives Phantom people who built and operated their own markets on Hyperliquid.

HYPE, the token underpinning Hyperliquid, traded around $65, down about 2% over 24 hours, roughly in line with Bitcoin's 2.8% slide over the same period, and up about 6% over the past week, according to CoinGecko.

Phantom has not said what the Ventuals founders will build at the company or whether the hire signals a deeper move into pre-IPO or equity perpetuals.

A Team With Hyperliquid Pedigree

Ventuals described itself as the first onchain derivatives protocol for private, pre-IPO company valuations, with each market tracking a synthetic price rather than a claim on shares. Alvin Hsia was the company's chief executive and Emily Hsia its chief technology officer; both previously worked at Goldfinch and Airbnb, and earlier co-founded a project called Shadow.

The team built its markets through Hyperliquid's HIP-3 framework, which lets outside developers deploy and run their own perpetual-futures markets backed by a HYPE stake. Ventuals' flagship contracts let traders take leveraged positions on the valuations of OpenAI and Anthropic, neither of which is publicly traded. In the wind-down, those markets were frozen at their trailing 24-hour average prices and settled, and the team confirmed there would be no Ventuals token.

Phantom's Derivatives Push

Phantom is the dominant wallet in the Solana ecosystem, with roughly 39% of Solana wallet market share and 15 million to 20 million monthly active users, and a $3 billion valuation set in a January 2025 Series C led by Sequoia Capital and Paradigm. The wallet has moved well beyond storage, adding swaps, staking, a prediction-market feature and, since mid-2025, perpetuals.

Phantom's perps product runs on Hyperliquid and surpassed $10 billion in cumulative trading volume within months of its July 2025 launch, the company has said. It has since added equity perpetuals deployed through HIP-3. The Ventuals founders' background in deploying and running such markets maps directly onto that roadmap, though Phantom did not detail the team's specific roles.