Fomo Co-Founders on Building the Social Network for Finance

FOMO was incorporated on approximately December 30, 2024, and its three co-founders, Paul, Say, and Rashaan, all spent roughly four years at DYDX before starting the company. Rashaan built the first version of the mobile app and leads engineering. Say is a trader and Paul describes himself as a normie user, a deliberate push-pull dynamic the team uses to make product decisions. The company raised at a $550 million valuation through a party round of roughly 100 to 150 angel investors, later followed by a $75 million round with a team of approximately 18 people. Benchmark and Index Ventures participated, notable because both rarely invest in crypto. The company describes itself as having been profitable before the raise and characterizes the larger round as partly opportunistic and partly defensive against cyclical market downturns.

FOMO describes itself as a consumer app built on crypto rails rather than a crypto consumer app, with a stated goal of becoming the largest trading app in the world and the social layer of all finance. Say estimates roughly 100,000 people actively use crypto DeFi apps on any given day outside of bull market peaks, rising five to ten times during bull markets, which the founders argue makes building exclusively for crypto-native users an insufficient strategy. They contend blockchain provides three structural advantages for a social finance product: global distribution from day one, permissionless value transfer, and on-chain transparency that ties pseudonymous identities to real wallet activity, automatically generating a social layer from trading behavior. They argue prior social finance products like eToro's copy trading failed due to confirmation bias and obfuscation of actual trades, problems blockchain transparency structurally solves.

FOMO had approximately 600,000 to 700,000 lifetime signed-up users at the time of recording, with roughly 30 percent holding funded accounts and around 6,000 to 7,000 daily active traders. A breakout growth moment occurred in July 2025 during a company offsite in Cape Cod when key stats approximately 10x overnight, driven by a single creator called Wealth Gathers posting repeated content about FOMO on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. The founders said this confirmed the app worked for non-crypto normies. Crypto Twitter users represent roughly 10 percent of FOMO users but drive approximately 40 to 50 percent of trading volume. The platform signed up roughly 12,000 users and saw approximately 7,500 first deposits in a single day during the conversation.

FOMO charges 5 basis points on Solana and major asset spot trades, 50 basis points on long-tail spot trades, and 5 basis points on perpetuals, with users still responsible for third-party protocol fees. By comparison, Robinhood charges 85 basis points each way on Bitcoin. FOMO routes entirely through DEXs, pays aggregated routers a monthly fee so users receive the full benefit of positive slippage, and absorbs gas fees, token rent, and priority fees on behalf of users. Robinhood offers roughly 100 to 150 crypto assets while FOMO offers tens of millions. The platform requires users to trade from a USDC cash balance and does not allow wallet imports, a decision that made early growth harder but is now seen as preserving social graph trust and ensuring uniform tooling across participants.

Every post on FOMO must be tied to a trade rather than allowing standalone commentary, a design choice intended to reduce noise and increase signal. The platform does not support automatic copy trading, citing manipulation risks such as buying illiquid tokens and dumping on followers. Full transparency, including publicly visible stats like average hold time, is described as a structural deterrent to predatory behavior. The social feed is currently underutilized and largely chronological, which the team considers a major opportunity, with plans to build ranked personalized feeds similar to TikTok and Twitter after pausing social feature development to prioritize a web app and a perpetuals product.

The perpetuals product launched only two weeks before the recording, was integrated using Hyperliquid builder code in two and a half weeks, and had no social features or notifications at the time. FOMO has ranked as high as number two on the Hyperliquid builder code revenue leaderboard. Spot trading is at least an order of magnitude larger than perpetuals. Future revenue streams under consideration include a premium tier called FOMO Gold with guaranteed execution priority, native yield on stablecoins and major assets through lend-borrow partnerships, and a potential native stablecoin partnership where yield would be shared with the platform. A paid proprietary data API sold to agents and trading platforms is also under consideration, with the founders citing Nasdaq's multi-billion dollar data business as a comparable model.

FOMO has no plans to launch a token, with the co-founders arguing that launching a token makes it the entire product and that the dual equity-and-token model has historically failed largely due to regulatory constraints. Their preferred exit is an IPO, arguing public market presence signals regulatory oversight in the way Robinhood and Coinbase benefit from it. Adding Apple Pay was identified as the single biggest growth event for the platform, and the co-founders predict onboarding friction will become a solved commodity issue within a few years, removing it as a competitive differentiator. Both co-founders believe crypto will meaningfully outperform stocks over a three-year horizon from the time of recording, arguing stocks have run up significantly while crypto is at a local minimum, and pointing to crypto infrastructure enabling earlier price discovery on private companies than traditional IPO timelines allow.