A closer look at how Phantom surpassed Coinbase in the App Store rankings

There is a new, albeit surprising, top crypto app in town.

Despite the Ethereum ETF approvals, Coinbase has been mostly flat in the U.S. App Store since the March rally. The popular exchange’s mobile offering breached the top 50 free apps at the start of March, as bitcoin was on the precipice of reaching new heights, and then sank as the market euphoria faded out and inflation fears calmed the markets. Since April, the Coinbase app has tended to rank somewhere between positions 300 and 200 and has been showing some slow growth since dropping to rank 396 on May 12.

Enter Phantom. The app is a crypto wallet that established its name by becoming one of the most prominent Solana SOL +0.34% wallets but has now expanded its offerings to include Ethereum , Polygon and Bitcoin .

It is unusual for a wallet to become as popular, and in this case, more popular than a major crypto exchange. For instance, we still have not seen Metamask, one of the most well-known crypto wallets, breach the top 500 free apps over the past three months.

But Phantom naturally got a boost for its Solana compatibility. The mobile version of the wallet first breached the top 500 in early March, when the crypto rally was most frothy and when the Solana memecoin ecosystem was catching a lot of attention. For many of the more niche Solana memecoins, it wasn’t possible to trade them on an exchange like Coinbase since it didn’t list them; you had to do it on a native DEX, which Phantom helped people access.

Phantom dropped out of the top 500 free apps in mid-April, similar to how Coinbase’s ranking fell.

But all of a sudden, the app gained an unprecedented level of popularity, jumping into the top 100 on May 18 and holding there, even breaking the top 50 some days recently. It’s also been dominating in the Utilities category, where it is sorted for Apple (as opposed to Finance, like Coinbase). And in the U.S. Google Play Store, it jumped to number 2 in the Finance category, surpassing PayPal. (Editor's note: Phantom reached the top of this category after this newsletter's publication.)

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It’s not clear whether this explosive growth is sustainable or even really organic. While the hype around the Ethereum ETF has reignited some spark in the market, the Solana ecosystem is still not seeing the same levels of excitement that it was in March.

But an App Store rank is not all about new downloads; it's also about user retention, reviews and ratings, and a  slew of other factors. It doesn’t seem like an easy system to game since simply buying app downloads wouldn’t move the needle that much, but developers can have more control over things like app update frequency and language localization relative to the actual app consumers.

It’s also possible that retention from first-time downloaders during the memecoin mania has helped Phantom to break into the mainstream and warrant this app ranking. The platform boasted about its 7 million  monthly active users across both their browser extension and mobile app, which is not too far off the  8 million monthly transacting users that Coinbase reported in its first-quarter earnings.

This is an excerpt from  The Block's Data Insights newsletter . Dig into the numbers making up the industry’s most thought-provoking trends.