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Phantom just made a quiet but consequential hire. The team behind Ventuals, a platform that let traders speculate on private company valuations like OpenAI and SpaceX using permissionless perpetual futures, is joining Phantom as of this week.
What Ventuals was, and why it matters
Ventuals built something genuinely unusual: synthetic perpetual markets on private firm valuations, running on Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 framework. In plain terms, that means traders could take leveraged positions, up to 20x, on what OpenAI or SpaceX might be worth, without any of those companies being publicly listed.
The platform announced it was sunsetting on June 15, 2026, settling all its open HIP-3 markets before shutting down. Two weeks later, CEO Alvin Hsia confirmed on X that the team was heading to Phantom.
Before the lights went out, Ventuals had logged over $650 million in cumulative trading volume. A HYPE staking vault equivalent to $38 million filled within minutes of launch. Ventuals operated without a dedicated token. All activity ran through Hyperliquid’s HYPE token and its staking variant, vHYPE, which kept the platform’s incentive structure tightly coupled to the Hyperliquid ecosystem.
Phantom’s bigger picture
Phantom already has significant skin in the Hyperliquid game. The wallet is Hyperliquid’s largest distribution partner, and by mid-2026 it had processed over $37 billion in perpetual volume while generating over $20 million in builder code revenue, all in less than a year of operating in that capacity.
Phantom integrated Kalshi’s prediction markets in December 2025. Adding a team that spent its existence building sophisticated derivatives infrastructure on Hyperliquid is the next logical step. Alvin Hsia and CTO Emily Hsia led Ventuals through its entire run. Bringing that leadership into Phantom means the institutional knowledge around HIP-3 markets, private valuation mechanics, and perpetual liquidity design comes with the team.
Phantom has a 20-million-plus user base. For traders, wallet-native perps matter because they remove friction — the trade happens where the assets already live, without bridging funds to a separate platform, managing multiple interfaces, or trusting an additional custodian.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
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