Phantom grew from a Solana-only extension into a wallet spanning Ethereum, Base, Bitcoin, Polygon and more. We tested its swap pricing, its scam detection and its new perpetual futures feature to see whether the expansion cost it any of its original polish.
Phantom built its reputation as the wallet Solana users reached for first. We reinstalled it fresh, connected it across three chains, and pushed a swap and a perps trade through it to see whether spreading itself across Ethereum, Base and Bitcoin cost the extension any of the polish that made it the default in the first place.
The swap fee is not hidden, just not advertised
Every in-app swap carries a fee: 0.75% on Solana, 0.85% on EVM chains like Ethereum and Base. That is roughly in line with MetaMask's 0.875% and noticeably higher than Rabby's 0.25%. Phantom does not print this number on its homepage, and a first-time user swapping through the built-in widget will not see it broken out clearly until the quote screen. It is not a scam fee; it funds the aggregation and routing behind the swap. It is, however, avoidable: bridging tokens out to a dedicated DEX interface and swapping there sidesteps it entirely, at the cost of an extra step.
Scam detection actually catches things
We tested Phantom's flagged-transaction warning against a handful of known malicious approval requests pulled from public phishing reports, and it correctly surfaced a warning before signing on each one. The open-source phishing blocklist did the same for domains already reported as fraudulent. Neither feature is unique to Phantom anymore, several competitors ship similar warnings, but Phantom's version fires early enough in the flow that a distracted user is likely to actually see it rather than click past it.
