Phantom, the biggest Solana pockets by market share, stated the group behind Ventuals is becoming a member of the corporate this week, weeks after the Hyperliquid-based perpetuals venue shut down.
The hires are Ventuals co-founders Alvin Hsia and Emily Hsia, together with engineer Aris Samad, Phantom stated in an announcement on its X account and an organization weblog submit. The deal is just not a purchase order of the corporate or its product.
Ventuals wound down its onchain pre-IPO buying and selling platform in mid-June, reporting greater than $650 million in lifetime buying and selling quantity and over 500,000 $HYPE raised throughout its run.
The transfer folds expertise from one among Hyperliquid’s earliest pre-IPO perpetuals builders right into a shopper pockets that has been increasing aggressively into derivatives. Phantom added in-wallet perpetual futures, powered by Hyperliquid, in July 2025, and has since prolonged into fairness and pre-IPO-style markets. Hiring the Ventuals founders offers Phantom individuals who constructed and operated their very own markets on Hyperliquid.
$HYPE, the token underpinning Hyperliquid, traded round $65, down about 2% over 24 hours, roughly according to Bitcoin’s 2.8% slide over the identical interval, and up about 6% over the previous week, in accordance with CoinGecko.
Phantom has not stated what the Ventuals founders will construct on the firm or whether or not the rent alerts a deeper transfer into pre-IPO or fairness perpetuals.
A Group With Hyperliquid Pedigree
Ventuals described itself as the primary onchain derivatives protocol for personal, pre-IPO firm valuations, with every market monitoring an artificial worth moderately than a declare on shares. Alvin Hsia was the corporate’s chief government and Emily Hsia its chief know-how officer; each beforehand labored at Goldfinch and Airbnb, and earlier co-founded a undertaking referred to as Shadow.
The group constructed its markets by means of Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 framework, which lets exterior builders deploy and run their very own perpetual-futures markets backed by a $HYPE stake. Ventuals’ flagship contracts let merchants take leveraged positions on the valuations of OpenAI and Anthropic, neither of which is publicly traded. Within the wind-down, these markets had been frozen at their trailing 24-hour common costs and settled, and the group confirmed there could be no Ventuals token.
Phantom’s Derivatives Push
Phantom is the dominant pockets within the Solana ecosystem, with roughly 39% of Solana pockets market share and 15 million to twenty million month-to-month energetic customers, and a $3 billion valuation set in a January 2025 Sequence C led by Sequoia Capital and Paradigm. The pockets has moved effectively past storage, including swaps, staking, a prediction-market characteristic and, since mid-2025, perpetuals.
Phantom’s perps product runs on Hyperliquid and surpassed $10 billion in cumulative buying and selling quantity inside months of its July 2025 launch, the corporate has stated. It has since added fairness perpetuals deployed by means of HIP-3. The Ventuals founders’ background in deploying and operating such markets maps straight onto that roadmap, although Phantom didn’t element the group’s particular roles.
