#ChartoftheDay Phantom Wallet, one of the most popular Solana wallets, is back up and running after it went down yesterday because of a significant backend incident, according to data from SolanaFloor. The downtime coincided with the GRASS token airdrop, which went live 6 minutes before the Phantom outage. Market participants believe the surge in user activity related to the airdrop was the cause.

Although the wallet’s backend infrastructure was resolved in 2 hours and 44 minutes, this raised people’s renewed concerns over the stability of major wallets.

Decentralized #wallets act as the gateway to interacting with #cryptocurrencies and the general #Web3 ecosystem. In the ecosystem of each major public blockchain, there is a dominant wallet application, such as Metamask for Ethereum and other EVM chains and Phantom for Solana blockchain. Despite over a decade of development, on-chain wallets still face challenges, such as system outages, errors, and technical glitches that undermine the user experience.

This exposed some critical issues with the infrastructure sector: projects cannot provide highly professional and reliable services in a specific niche segment. On the one hand, some projects like wallets, which are often equity-based, move especially slow because of a lack of incentives for user engagement and feedback; on the other hand, some other infra projects like pubic chains are chasing the “quick money” with fast token launches while failing to polish their products to the best of their capabilities. From this aspect, crypto infrastructure still has a long way to go in order to catch up with their #Web2 counterparts.