Phantom Wallet: The Crypto Wallet That Can’t Seem to Stay Online 🤯

So, you’ve got your shiny new Phantom wallet. You’re all set to dive headfirst into the exciting world of crypto, right? WRONG. Turns out, Phantom is a bit like a teenager trying to drive a car – enthusiasm abounds, but the actual execution leaves much to be desired.

In a recent “incident” (they call it an outage, I call it a meltdown), Phantom decided it needed a little nap. “Oops, sorry, folks, we’re down,” they chirped on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. The Phantom team assured everyone it was “temporary”, but you know, when you’re holding your crypto, temporary can feel like an eternity. It was like watching your favourite Netflix show get interrupted by a buffering circle, but instead of “House of Cards”, it’s your precious digital assets at stake.

“All services are back up. We apologize for the downtime. We understand how important it is to access your assets and are taking steps to prevent future outages,” Phantom wrote, in what I can only describe as a desperate attempt to regain some semblance of credibility.

This wasn’t Phantom’s first rodeo, mind you. Back in the good ol’ days of October 2023, Phantom had a little “uptime incident” (yes, it was so ironic, they named it that). This time, it coincided with the airdrop of Grass, a Solana (SOL)-based AI project, because, of course. The “uptime incident” was so bad, that Phantom advised users to “use decentralized applications in case they needed to handle urgent transactions.” Which is like telling a car that’s stuck in a ditch to just… walk.

Then came November 2024, where Phantom decided to play a game of “Lock Out the Users”. Apparently, they had an update glitch that locked out iOS users “due to repeated resets”. No, this wasn’t some elaborate security feature. This was Phantom saying, “Hey, we don’t know how to fix this, so we’re just going to pretend it’s a good idea”. It’s like forgetting your own password and blaming it on the phone.

And if all that wasn’t enough, earlier this month, Scam Sniffer, a Web3 security platform, outed Phantom for being the victim of a phishing attack. Apparently, some scammers tried to steal users’ seed phrases with fake pop-ups. You’d think a wallet that can’t stay online would be a bit more careful about who they let in, but hey, what can you do?

All this being said, Phantom Wallet did try to redeem itself by adding support for other blockchains like Sui and Base. They even added multi-currency support, so you can view your balances in 16 different currencies. But let’s be honest, it’s like putting a new coat of paint on a rusty car – it might look better, but it’s still got the same underlying issues. 😜

2025-02-12 21:16

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