Phantom, the biggest Solana pockets by market share, stated the staff 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 shouldn’t be a purchase order of the corporate or its product.
Ventuals wound down its onchain pre-IPO trading 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 certainly one of 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 provides 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 line 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 Workforce With Hyperliquid Pedigree
Ventuals described itself as the primary onchain derivatives protocol for personal, pre-IPO firm valuations, with every market monitoring an artificial value reasonably than a declare on shares. Alvin Hsia was the corporate’s chief govt and Emily Hsia its chief know-how officer; each beforehand labored at Goldfinch and Airbnb, and earlier co-founded a venture known as Shadow.
The staff constructed its markets by Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 framework, which lets outdoors 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 have been frozen at their trailing 24-hour common costs and settled, and the staff confirmed there can 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 nicely 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 HIP-3. The Ventuals founders’ background in deploying and working such markets maps straight onto that roadmap, although Phantom didn’t element the staff’s particular roles.
