What CASH is
CASH is a US dollar-pegged stablecoin issued by Phantom, the popular multi-chain crypto wallet, built using Bridge's Open Issuance platform in partnership with Stripe. Launched on Solana in September 2025, Phantom became the first business to issue a stablecoin through Bridge's issuance tooling, and CASH was designed from the outset to be the default store of value inside the Phantom wallet — the dollar-equivalent balance users hold between trades rather than a niche DeFi asset.
The mechanics lean on infrastructure Stripe built after acquiring Bridge: Open Issuance lets a business design, launch and manage its own branded stablecoin without building payment rails from scratch, handling reserve management, minting and redemption behind the scenes. CASH is pegged 1:1 to the US dollar and integrates directly with a broader Phantom product stack that includes a native fiat onramp, virtual accounts, and the Phantom Card — a debit card that rolled out to all users in spring 2026 and is already accepted at thousands of Stripe merchants. The strategic logic is straightforward: rather than users holding USDC or USDT and Phantom capturing none of the economics, Phantom captures the reserve yield on CASH balances directly, following the same playbook stablecoin issuers like Circle and Tether have used, just from inside a wallet with tens of millions of users rather than a standalone issuer.
Risks worth knowing
CASH is a young stablecoin from a wallet company, not a bank or a long-established issuer — reserve composition, auditing cadence and redemption guarantees matter enormously for any dollar-pegged token, and Phantom's track record as an issuer is measured in months, not years. Concentration in a single ecosystem is also a factor: CASH launched on Solana, so its liquidity, redemption pathways and smart contract risk are all tied to that chain and to Bridge's issuance infrastructure functioning correctly. Regulatory treatment of wallet-issued stablecoins is still developing, and a product this tightly coupled to Stripe's payment rails and card network carries real counterparty dependency on Stripe and Bridge continuing to support it on current terms.
There's also the standard peg risk every stablecoin carries: confidence, not code, ultimately holds a dollar peg together, and any doubt about reserve backing or redemption reliability can trigger a de-peg regardless of how well-designed the issuance infrastructure is. CASH's appeal rests heavily on convenience within the Phantom ecosystem — it hasn't yet been tested by a genuine liquidity crunch or redemption run the way older stablecoins have.
The bottom line
CASH is a logical next step for Phantom as it moves from wallet to full payments platform, backed by credible infrastructure from Stripe and Bridge, but it's still a new entrant in a category where trust is earned over years of clean redemptions, not months of smooth product launches.