Solana’s Phantom wallet plans to launch its iOS beta on Thursday with a twist: you’ll need to buy an NFT access pass to get in on the mobile release.
The closed-source crypto wallet – as prominent in Solanaland as MetaMask is for the Etherverse – will sell 7,000 non-fungible tokens (NFTs) through the Magic Eden marketplace on Tuesday afternoon. It said it will donate all mint proceeds and 10% from secondary sales to the tech non-profit Girls Who Code.
The exact form that the drop would take appeared fluid Tuesday morning. A blog post from Magic Eden described a “Dutch auction” with an 8 SOL ceiling that drops by .25 SOL every 10 minutes. If that format goes through, it would be Magic Eden’s first Dutch auction.
It may not get the chance. A representative for Magic Eden told CoinDesk: “We may be changing our approach to this drop.”
Phantom goes mobile
Demand for a Phantom mobile app has been simmering for months as the price of SOL, Solana’s native asset, surged.
Phantom boasted 1 million active users in November as the most popular crypto wallet for Solana-based decentralized finance (DeFi). It became an ecosystem kingpin despite lacking a mobile app and held its throne even as competing apps such as Solflare launched theirs. The demand has been so heated that some over-eager Phantom users have reported losing their wallet balances to opportunistic scammers who filled the void with phony apps.
Both companies (and leadership at the blockchain’s keystone stakeholder, Solana Labs) have called mobile wallet apps critical to the superfast network’s long-term growth. Mobile wallets let users trade, send, swap and stake cryptocurrencies and NFTs from their phones.
Read more: Solana Wallets Phantom, Solflare Eye Mobile for Growth
Perhaps getting ahead of secondary trading chicanery, Phantom on Monday warned would-be aftermarket buyers to verify sellers’ access passes had not yet been “redeemed,” lest they buy an NFT with zero utility.
The full iOS rollout will come in about a month, according to Phantom.
