When we think about wallets, both in the traditional and digital sense, we still think of them as a tool that holds financial assets. For the physical wallet, they hold cash or credit cards. For the digital wallet, they hold digital cash, cards, alternative assets (eg: crypto), and goods like NFTs or tickets.
However weāre seeing these wallets grow up before our eyes, from a simple app that stores assets to a massive hub for interactions, both financial and non-financial.
The wallet app with 15M MAUs and a $3B valuation as of January 2025 has expanded significantly since its early days as browser extension wallet for Solana users. Two updates have stuck out to me:
Usernames
The wallet introduced usernames last September, making the long alphanumeric strings that are wallet addresses less confusing. Users can also follow each other, opening the door for future interactions that go beyond sending and receiving tokens.
Perps
Phantom announced a partnership with Hyperliquid, allowing users to trade 100+ tokens on up to 40x leverage (eg: If Bitcoin goes up/down 1% your position goes up/down 40%. Exciting and veryyy dangerous for the inexperienced).
Hyperliquid is a fairly confusing platform for the unintiated. Phantom perps makes Hyperliquid accessible and friendly to the masses, for better and worse, and will be rolling out in the coming weeks.
Coinbase has been cooking with the Coinbase wallet app as well, rebuilding the app and prioritizing social features and mini apps.
The team has been slowly leaking sneak peeks of the new app:
Interacting with AI agents and apps
Users will be able to interact with agents, make trades, and use mini apps through chat.
āMint, tip, vote. All from the feed.ā
With the focus on mini-apps, users will be able to do everything onchain in one place, making onboarding and distribution easier than what it looks like today.
Coinbase Wallet TBA
Lastly, it seems like Coinbase Wallet will be going through a rebrand, likely coinciding with Baseās A New Day One event on July 16. This times well with Baseās previous Onchain Summer events in 2023 and 2024, so weāll see if they make it 3 in a row or if they go in a different direction.
Today Rumble (video platform) announced that they are partnering with Moonpay to create the Rumble Wallet, with Moonpay facilitating the transactions.
Furthermore, Rumble received a $775M strategic investment from Tether last December, so we know which stablecoin will be the preferred (maybe even the only) one for the Rumble Wallet.
As with all corporate announcements, details are vague, but it seems one of the focuses on the wallet will be to enhance creator monetization, and Iāve already laid out how streamers/creators can benefit and how stablecoins can benefit consumers.
Another example unique to Rumble could be content creators could get exclusive discounts on approved content creation hardware and software when paying with Tetherās USDT in the Rumble Wallet.
Vendors get increased sales, Rumble gets increased adoption of their Wallet and splits the affiliate fee theyād typically receive to subsidize the discount, the USDT yield could be split between Moonpay/Rumble/Creator (donāt ask me about the details lol), and Tether gets increased adoption of their stablecoin.
Over the past decade, weāve seen a number of companies evolve into the superapp behemoths they are today. In the US, there are several examples:
The future section is blank because Iām not gonna speculate, jk I will. My gut tells me financial services (in addition to AI) is the next frontier and with stablecoins and friendlier regulation, this will be fast-tracked. Oh wait, itās basically confirmed!
On the other hand, weāre seeing wallets come from the other side starting from finance and make their first expansionary effort: social and content (donāt forget ads either!).
Assuming that goes well, weāll see wallets go from hubs of financial and social interactions to becoming hubs for interactions in general š¤
Do you have a wallet? If so, share or subscribe!
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Last week I watched the F1 movie at a movie theater for the first time in years. While reserving seats at my local AMC theater, I stumbled upon an interesting page: AMCās Investor Connect program.
Apparently AMC stockholders receive āinvestor exclusiveā perks such as priority lane access, 50% off tickets on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, double point Tuesdays which are redeemable for $5 reward vouchers, and more.
This is the first time Iāve come across this type of program, where a publicly traded consumer-facing company offered perks for their stockholders. This also helps considering a decent amount of retail investors probably hold the stock due to the memestock mania of 2021.
If AMC has a program like this, thereās gotta be more right? And sure enough, there are:
Carnival Cruises offers on-board credit to shareholders since 2000! Competing cruise companies like Royal Caribbean and Norwegian Cruise Line do the same, the perks of competition š
Hotel companies like Accor and IHG offer special perks and shareholder booking portals
Vital Farms, an egg distributor, gives shareholders a coupon for a free 18-pack of eggs every quarter. Pretty cool to have a stock that literally feeds you š³
Why bring this up? First of all, this is interesting and TPan likes interesting. Secondly, this is related to a larger theme in web3 and crypto that has been parroted for years.
For tokens: How does the token accrue value back to the user?
For NFTs: Whatās the utility?
With the latter, weāve seen early versions of what that could look like with token-gated access for exclusive merch, airdrop magnets, and allowlists.
For the former, itās historically been price go up and more recently weāre seeing token buybacks, burns, and fee revenue splits, also resulting in some version of price go up. Price go up is by far the most important, but how else can a token differentiate itself, just as some of these stocks have?
As more tokens associated with physical products and companies launch (or these companies with already launched tokens grow), I suspect weāll see more token holder perks pop up. A few examples of how these tokenholder perks could be complimentary to a business:
Prioritized access to new features or beta versions
Upgraded subscription tiers or increased credit balances
Holder bonuses, eg: PENGU token or Pudgy Penguin NFT holders could receive in-game bonuses when playing Pudgy Party (releasing on mobile late August!) on a regularly occurring basis.
As investing has become DTC and democratized, both traditional equities and novel tokens will look to provide more benefits to those who are financially aligned. And sometimes, all they want is to feel appreciated with a couple of perks š
See you next week!
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