Fomo Co-Founders on Building the Social Network for Finance

FOMO was incorporated on approximately December 30, 2024, and raised a party round in early January 2025 at a $550 million valuation. The round involved roughly 100 to 150 angel investors, structured deliberately to build distribution across builders and early traders rather than taking a single institutional anchor. Benchmark and Index participated despite both firms rarely doing crypto deals, with Benchmark having largely shifted focus to AI after earlier investments in Chainalysis and Telegram. The founders preferred non-crypto VCs specifically because crypto VCs develop pattern-matching fatigue from seeing repeated similar deals.

FOMO has three co-founders: Paul, Say, and Rashaan, with many team members being former DYDX employees. Say argues that consumer crypto has failed repeatedly because the addressable daily active user base is only around 100,000 people, which is too small a total addressable market. FOMO considers itself a consumer app built on crypto rails rather than a crypto consumer app, with a stated goal of being the largest trading app in the world and the social layer of all finance. The founders argue that prior social finance apps failed due to confirmation bias and obfuscation of actual trades, problems that blockchain transparency solves by automatically generating a social layer from users' on-chain activity tied to self-custodied wallets.

A breakout moment occurred during a company offsite in Cape Cod in July 2025, when a single TikTok creator called Wealth Gathers drove a 10x overnight spike in app stats. That creator turned out to be the co-founder's best friend's brother, who did not know the co-founder was running FOMO. The event confirmed the product worked for non-crypto normies, and FOMO was using an Apple Pay onboarding flow at the time. Adding Apple Pay was identified as the single biggest growth event for the platform overall, and low KYC success rates and onboarding friction are described as the largest bottleneck facing crypto consumer apps broadly.

FOMO has approximately 700,000 lifetime signed-up users, with roughly 30 percent having deposited into funded accounts. At the time of recording the platform was signing up approximately 12,000 users and seeing approximately 7,500 first deposits in a single day. Roughly 10 percent of the user base comes from crypto-native traders, but that group drives approximately 30 to 50 percent of trading volume. The platform charges 5 basis points on Solana trades and major spot assets and perpetuals, and 50 basis points on long-tail spot assets, compared to Robinhood's 85 basis points each way on crypto. Robinhood offers roughly 100 to 150 crypto assets while FOMO offers tens of millions.

FOMO does not support automatic copy trading, citing manipulation risks such as buying illiquid tokens and dumping on followers, and instead relies on full public transparency including average hold time and social reputation metrics. The platform does not allow manual slippage settings, pays gas fees and priority fees on behalf of users, and routes all trades through DEXs with no market makers. Every thesis on the platform must be tied to a trade rather than allowing standalone posts, a design choice intended to reduce noise and increase signal. Users cannot import external wallets, a decision that made early growth harder but ensures all participants trade natively on FOMO, preserving the integrity of its social graph.

FOMO raised $75 million in its most recent round and describes itself as having been profitable before the raise. The team is approximately 18 people. The raise was specifically intended to fortify the balance sheet against cyclical downturns, with transaction fees acknowledged as a highly cyclical business model. The perpetuals product launched only two weeks before the recording and already ranks between second and sixth on the Hyperliquid builder code revenue leaderboard on a given day, though spot trading is currently at least an order of magnitude larger. The co-founders predict perpetuals will eventually balance with or overtake spot as more assets come on chain, and that all trading including centralized exchanges will route on chain within five to ten years.

FOMO has no plans to launch a token. The co-founders argue that token launches tend to become the entire product, that the dual model of equity and token has historically failed largely due to regulatory constraints, and that typical token launches involve a single in-house person negotiating with smaller crypto market makers under terms that tend to crash the price. The stated exit preference is an IPO, with the view that public company status builds consumer trust for a trading application in a way a token launch does not, pointing to Robinhood and Coinbase as examples where regulatory oversight signaled by public status likely contributed to user growth. A paid proprietary data API serving AI agents and trading platforms is identified as a potential future business line, with the observation that Nasdaq is a multi-billion dollar data business and crypto exchanges have not yet monetized their data comparably.