Fomo 联合创始人谈打造金融社交网络

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All right, everyone. Very excited about this one. I've been wanting to do this for a little bit, and the time is right. Coming off the back of a big raise and a $550 million valuation, we've got the co-founders of FOMO. Two of the 3 co-founders, right? Paul says we're missing one.

Pashawn.

Pashawn. All right. Love goes out to Pashawn. What does Pashawn do? How do you guys split your roles?

Pashawn is our head of engineering, and he built the first version of the mobile app. Se and I used to handle everything else that wasn't engineering. Luckily, we're able to specialize a little bit more because we hired a head of finance recently and added some other roles, but Se and I do product, BD, and growth. We did some operations, and we're handing a lot of that off now.

I think the main differentiator comes from our perspective, not necessarily the work. Se is a trader, and he's been a trader for a long time. I'm more of a normie user, and there's always this push and pull in every product decision we make. Se is like, "Okay, the trader wants this," and I'm like, "Well, the normal person wouldn't understand this." So we build the product for both groups, and I think that's why it works really well.

Have you guys had any huge debates?

Every product decision.

Yeah, every single day. We think that's the beauty of it. It's a push and pull. I don't always try to bias toward a trader, but in a lot of ways, it's like, "Okay, this is what I've seen in the market. This is what's easy and intuitive." But then it's something that the user might not understand if they've never seen crypto before.

It's not just the 2 of us, either. Pretty much everybody on our entire team has product sense. We'll get up in the middle of the day and have a 30-minute conversation about a very small feature or a small polish item. It might seem small in the moment, but these things really add up. We go deep into every single thing that we ship.

Okay, so take us back. Paul, I think you messaged me when you guys raised this party round. It was, like, 100 or 150 angels.

Probably January or February.

Of maybe even January 2025?

2025.

Okay. You guys both worked at dYdX?

Yeah, we both worked at dYdX for about 4 years. We joined a couple of months after each other. Then I was just taking some time off and started iterating on some ideas. I took a birthday trip with some friends to Joshua Tree, and we were thinking about some ideas. Then we decided to start building.

We actually incorporated on December 30, 2024—the last day of the year—and then we started raising the round in early January 2025.

Nice. Why did you guys structure it as a party round?

I think it's really important for a consumer product to build distribution. Instead of having 1 institutional anchor, we wanted to be able to leverage all these different partners, whether they're builders or others. We also wanted to have some early traders who would be testers and loyal users of the product, with ownership as well. That was the main reason.

Did it work?

Yeah, I think it worked pretty well. It helped us bootstrap.

The hardest thing with consumer, especially a marketplace like a social trading app, is building a 2-sided market. It's a chicken-and-egg problem because you need new traders to fund, but you also need the top traders to provide information.

Being able to do both at once was the only way we could bootstrap.

Yeah. Makers and takers.

Exactly.

Before we get too deep into FOMO, let's talk about the state of the union on a couple of things. One is consumer crypto. There have been many, many, many attempts at consumer crypto. Why do you guys think you're the first really big breakout consumer crypto app? I'm trying to think of the last couple of ones. We had Friend.tech, which was very hot for a little bit and then very dead. There are a couple you can list off, but you guys are the first really good one in a while. Why do you think so many consumer crypto companies didn't work out?

I think a lot of it is that crypto consumer is not a big enough category, right? We think of ourselves as a consumer app that's built on crypto rails. When you think about a consumer crypto app, you think, "Okay, I have this demographic of crypto users. I need to appease them and build for them." But I think you really miss the mark because there are maybe 50,000 to 100,000 people who are actually using apps every day.

In order to capture even a meaningful part of that, it's just not big enough. What ends up happening is like

50,000 to 100,000 as the crypto TAM?

Yes. Maybe in a bull market it's 5 to 10 times that, but on any given day—today or tomorrow—there are maybe 100,000 people who are actually using crypto DeFi apps or whatever other apps.

I think the mistake is that you build for a consumer who is arguably the best consumer type in the world. Crypto users are going to use anything. They'll try it if it's meaningful. If there's a way for them to make money or be early, they'll go try it, give you feedback, and use it.

We've never been so close to a user as we have been when we've been building in crypto. You build for an audience that is going to work its way around whatever product you build, and you need to be able to build for mass consumers, which is the rest of the world.

What do you guys think about perps in general? I feel like dYdX—I guess you could say BitMEX kicked off perps, then dYdX brought them on-chain, and then you had the whole next cycle. You could say GMX, and now it's obviously Hyperliquid.

What do you guys think? It feels like dYdX fumbled this huge opportunity, but I'm very curious to get your take. You're post-dYdX, so I don't know how you guys feel about it.

I think timing is really important. The first time I joined dYdX, I started to realize how amazing these perps were. I think Se did too, and our whole team did, but the products were too technical. There was no way for consumers to access them, especially in the United States, and that's still true.

Some centralized exchanges are starting to get licenses now, but the way people were trying to explain what perps were to consumers just wasn't working. There was no adoption, and there was no interest.

As soon as institutions had this aha moment where they said, "This is a massive instrument. Let's adopt it," consumers started to build more trust. They were like, "What is this? It's time to get educated." Then people put more resources into actually educating people about what perps are.

I still think it's missing the mark. Most people still don't know what perps are. But over the next few years, I do think it will become much more obvious what they are. Fundamentally, perps sound like a very complicated thing, but under the hood, they're actually very, very simple.

1. Media And Frictionless Onboarding

Interesting. Do you think dYdX could have turned into Hyperliquid, or do you think it was just the wrong team at the wrong time?

Of course I think so. Our team was incredible, right? A lot of the builders at FOMO were ex-dYdX. I think we had the right team. I think the timing was a little off.

Unfortunately, the FTX blowup and all that happened when dYdX was growing. Then, due to both regulatory and strategic product decisions, we had this dYdX v3 product that was actually functioning very well, with an off-chain order book and a lot of market makers working.

Then we built the dYdX Chain, which was very innovative—building everything on-chain on an application-specific chain—but I think the infrastructure change hurt us a little because market makers weren't able to quote as well. That kind of led to a downward spiral while Hyperliquid is on the rise.

That team is incredible, though. I have a lot of respect for the leadership team there. They're all friends of ours, and it was definitely a heyday working there.

Yeah, it's a very relevant conversation, actually. A lot of the lessons you learned at dYdX can start to apply to FOMO. Should we have an app chain or not? Robinhood Chain obviously just launched. We'll get into how you guys think about Robinhood as a competitor and how you view that.

What do you think about the decision to launch app chains in general?

I think they make sense for specific use cases, right? Not everything is going to work on a general-purpose chain, or at least nothing that exists today at scale.

Maybe there are a few, like Monad, that are doing work to get to scale, but it just makes sense. You want to build your own ecosystem. You want to be able to control how the chain itself works—what’s allowed, what’s not—and dictate the direction of what actually happens there.

I think Ethereum, for example, is probably the biggest L1 today. They’ve got a lot of great builders, but they don’t really have a cohesive ecosystem direction at the moment. A lot of that is because they’ve been around for a while and there are a lot of different takes on what leadership wants.

For you to be truly focused on building one thing—an app chain that is specific to trading around Robinhood or Coinbase, or assets that are coming from these platforms—it’s got to be very, very intentional. I think that’s along the lines of how I would build FOMO, which is very intentional. Everything has to have a purpose. It can’t just be, “Open up the floodgates and let things happen.” You need to seal the door in some way.

Yeah, 100%.

Let’s get into FOMO.

Go ahead.

Yeah, I was going to say it actually goes back to your last question about how you build this breakout consumer app. I think you have to optimize for the best infrastructure, but you still need distribution. Consumers don’t really care if it’s an app chain or a general-purpose chain. If the app chain helps you build better infrastructure for execution, but it’s not a distribution play, then that’s a different question.

2. Selling The Social Finance Vision

Maybe the best place to start with FOMO is your fundraising history, because that gets into almost the story of what FOMO is. How do you guys talk about FOMO? You’ve done a couple of successful fundraises, and I think one of the reasons I wanted to have you guys on is that a couple of traditional investors—or, you know, this is the first crypto deal many of the folks on your cap table have actually done.

Yeah, so our goal is for FOMO to be the largest trading app in the world and the social layer of all finance. We think that a lot of people have tried to build a crypto consumer app as a new distribution channel for crypto products, or as a new platform that we could capitalize with skeuomorphic products that worked on the internet but weren’t on-chain.

Our goal is to figure out what the native use cases of the blockchain are that make it uniquely beneficial for consumers. One is that it’s a global distribution channel. From day 1, you could globally distribute this product. Two is that it’s fully transparent, and all the infrastructure for this transparency exists in this distributed network where people have these wallets and there’s a consensus mechanism around it.

What you can do is take a wallet that you have full custody of and show some representation of that. You could be Jason, or you could be Blocks Lover [?], or you could be New York 3835 [?], whatever, and have this pseudonym. But the transparency automatically creates this transparent social layer, where all you have to do is use this as a trading product and all of the social automatically follows from that.

That’s the story we tell: this is now the biggest revolution in financial products since trading was computerized for the first time in the 1970s. NASDAQ, the New York Stock Exchange—all of them are realizing that everything is moving on-chain because it’s a global distribution channel and because it’s permissionless value transfer.

When that happens, you can build this social network on top of the movement of any asset in the world, and it’s global. That’s how we sell the vision: there’s this new platform that’s blossoming, and consumers don’t have any access to it. But there are huge benefits with the discoverability of assets.

I think everyone has realized and known that there’s going to be a social consumer app, or social finance consumer app, that will take off. The reason it hasn’t worked is because it’s filled with confirmation bias: you only show trades that you want to show, or there’s obfuscation of what’s actually going on.

The blockchain, starting with this community of crypto traders, is the best way to start and then grow this community, where you could have people trading literally anything and expressing any thesis.

It’s funny. The first time I saw FOMO, the company that popped into my head was eToro. I feel like one of the things that made eToro so big and successful was copy trading 15 years ago.

So, back to the fundraiser: how did you guys put these deals together? It was Benchmark, Index Ventures, and USV, if I have that correctly. USV has done a lot of crypto stuff—Fred and their team are great—but Index and Benchmark don’t usually do much crypto stuff, definitely not Benchmark. How did these deals come together?

Benchmark was an interesting story. Fun fact: Paul and I were 15 minutes late to our first meeting with Chetan, so that’s the only meeting that we’re actually late to. It was some technicality on Zoom or whatever.

Nice. Maybe there’s a lesson there. Maybe that’s a flex.

Yeah.

I mean, we went into that call thinking, “Okay, they’ve got a great brand.” We admittedly didn’t know much about them until that point. We did our research afterward as well.

Cold intro? Cold email or—

No, it was a warm intro from a friend, one of our angel investors. They said, “Hey, you guys should meet. They don’t really look at crypto, but it’s worth discussing the landscape.”

We did that, and within the first 5 minutes, Chetan, who led our deal there, was just like, “I get it. I understand, and this is something that we have not really looked at for a while.” They did a few crypto deals with Chainalysis and something with Telegram back in the day, but I think they had turned their eye away from this, as many investors did, and looked into the world of AI.

I think now is a time where it’s like, “Okay, what’s next? Where is the technology evolving at such a rapid pace?” We had the conversation, had a few follow-on conversations, met the rest of the partnership, and I think they just understood.

That’s the thing that we very much appreciate. We built this product, and it might not really make sense today, but it’s going to make sense. This is a wedge that we’re finding, and we’re going to build on it. We said, “This is something that we’d love to have you on this journey for, if you’re interested,” and they were.

We’re very thankful for that, and it’s been great to build with Chetan and the rest of the team there.

With Index, I actually don’t know their crypto history all that much, but that was just another deal where the conversation was worth having. The introduction was from Chetan, which I actually think Julia tried to reach out to Paul early on through Henry at Privy. We just weren’t really interested in fundraising, and even when we started taking the conversation, we weren’t.

It became very clear to us that this is a partner that has done it before with Robinhood and Revolut, and really understands how to scale a consumer app. It was really interesting to us from the value proposition side: what can they bring from their individual experience and collectively as a firm?

Yeah. It’s interesting. There are so many people who have tried to do what you’re doing right now that it’s a tough pitch to land. I’ve probably had 30 pitches for crypto social trading. What do you guys think it is in your pitch that hit differently?

I actually think you hit on something really important. We wanted to work with non-crypto VCs because they’ve scaled the largest consumer apps in the world. Obviously, Benchmark scaled Twitter, Snapchat, Uber, and others.

I also think there’s an understanding that crypto companies only see crypto deals, and they get fatigued from seeing the same deal over and over. They put these blinders on: “Okay, I already said no to this deal.” When the thing that works is the right team building the right thing at the right time, you’ve just said no to a few deals and decided, “In my mind, I’m going to say no to every type of deal like this.”

The non-crypto VCs actually look at things individually because they have such a wide array. They’re doing data centers in space, design software, and FOMO. They can look at the team objectively, look at what we’re building, and actually understand it. I think that was a big advantage.

3. From Niche App To Breakout

I think that happened to me too when you reached out. I was like, “Oh my God, another social trading app.”

Did you guys always pitch it as a trading app, or did it start niche? There are 2 philosophies when you’re a founder building something: own a niche and then expand, or go for the world first.

Yeah, it definitely started more niche. I think we understood where it could go and had this really good feeling for how grand it could be, but we did start very niche. It was just an on-chain trading app on Solana, right? We saw Moonshot doing really well. They didn't have a social layer, but they simplified things really well. There was this app called Vector that was doing pretty well.

The Tensor guys.

Yeah. We respect that a lot, but we thought they built an experience that was really hard for a normal person to understand. It's kind of like building Axiom on your phone.

I used it. Yeah.

Yeah. So we thought we could do this better and distribute it better. We had a really good idea of the product sense, and we had this idea for these trade half sheets that we're the only ones who really do. You could actually go in and see where everyone bought in and the atomic units of the trade, and it's a much more intuitive experience.

So, with those building blocks, we started very specifically, then expanded out of Solana and now to all assets.

When did you guys think the company had its breakout moment? What was the breakout moment for the business?

You want to talk about the offsite?

Yeah. This was on our first company offsite in Cape Cod. There were maybe 8 of us.

Good. It's a good offsite.

Funny story, actually: the Airbnb was completely not ready. We were delayed by 24 to 48 hours, and then we ended up not having any time in the offsite because things started to blow up in a good way.

We were sitting there, and this is actually a hilarious story. There was a token that was running at the time. I won't mention what it was, but we were seeing a lot of people buy this token through the Apple Pay flow that we had, and there was just a lot of activity around the app. So, we looked at our stats, and they had pretty much 10×ed overnight.

We were looking on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, trying to figure out what was going on. Who was talking about FOMO? It turned out there was this one creator, Wealth Gathers, and he was doing content after content after content. Then I looked a little closer. It was actually my best friend's brother.

He didn't realize that I was running FOMO, and I didn't realize he was running it. This was in July of 2025.

Okay.

He was like, “Oh, man. I didn't know you were building FOMO. This app is incredible. I'm trying to get it to my audience.”

That was kind of the first growth moment, where people wanted to buy a specific coin but didn't really have a place to do it. So, they found FOMO, and it was very easy to onboard. That was kind of our aha moment: crypto people would have Phantom, but not normies.

Yeah, purely normie users.

That was the point at which we were like, okay, this app actually does work not just for a crypto crowd, which we'd already had empirical evidence of. We knew they could use it, but could the normal user use it? That was our moment of, okay, we need to double, triple down and really go hard for the people who can't access assets today.

Yeah. Was it like 3 assets—Bitcoin, ETH, and SOL—or was it all assets? Was it primarily memecoins at the time?

Yeah, long tail.

Yeah. A lot of it is still long tail, and we're starting to see longer hold times and more focus on larger assets. Obviously, as we add asset classes, the social graph will transfer over, and there's a lot that we're building on the social graph, too. But, yeah, I think those are really good onboarding moments for new users.

How did you guys build the platform and think about scale? There are these infrastructure decisions, like, should we have our own DEX? Do you route through Jupiter? Do you build internally? How do you think about it?

If you route through Jupiter today—which I'm guessing you do if it's on Solana—will you get into that business one day? How do you think about this?

Today, we route through a bunch of different aggregators: Jupiter, OKX, Cielo on Solana, 0x, and then a bunch of others on other chains.

I think there are levels there. There's the front end, the technology, the underlying infrastructure, and then—

How much do you want to verticalize the stack, basically?

Yeah. At this point, we feel like the opportunity to distribute on the front end, as a native mobile app or native web app, is so big that it's not really worth fragmenting our focus and thinking about the layers in between.

4. How Fomo Acquires Users

Over time, there is a world where you want to start owning more of it and make it cheaper for users end to end. I think that's when you can start thinking about how to bring some of these things in-house. For now, we're very much focused on distribution. We only have 600,000 to 700,000 users, and there are billions of people in the world who would actually benefit from this technology. We have a lot to do before we can start thinking about these things.

Yeah.

I think the way we think about it is: how do we create the best experience for the user? Right now, the front end needs a lot of work, so we're working on that. But when certain partners are failing, we're like, okay, maybe we do need to bring this in-house, just because we need more control over it so we can build it bespoke for us and give the user a better experience.

As we think about verticalization, it's about which pieces are the bottlenecks and failing most, and then how do we improve those so the user has a better experience?

Yeah. So, you said 500,000 to 700,000 users?

Something like that. Yeah.

Probably close to 700,000.

Maybe a little over 700,000.

Okay. So, this was the thing that blew up on Twitter. People were saying, “These numbers can't be real, right?” You mentioned there are 50,000 or 100,000 active people on Twitter—or maybe on Crypto Twitter—trading every day. Where are these users coming from?

They're mostly coming through traditional channels. I would say maybe 10% of our audience comes from Crypto Twitter and crypto traders natively. They still drive a majority of the volume, right? It's probably 30%, 40%, or 50% at times.

10% of the users come from Crypto Twitter, but maybe 40% of the volume?

Right, because they have higher transaction values. They have more money on-chain, and they trade in and out a lot more frequently versus the other 90% of our audience.

Those are lifetime users, by the way. People were giving us crap. They were like, “You don't have 500,000 daily traders.” Of course not. That's not a realistic outcome in crypto today. Hopefully, it will be one day.

But 600,000 or 700,000 people have signed up for the platform at some point. Is that deposited money?

No. That's lifetime users, and deposited users are probably about a 30% conversion. There's still some work to be done there, obviously. A lot of that is how do we improve crypto on-ramps, how do we improve the onboarding experience, et cetera?

But, yeah, that's the number today, and we hope this is actually 1,000 times bigger over the years. We'll still probably get controversy for it, but it is a really small number. Robinhood has 26 million funded accounts. They probably have double or triple that number of people who have actually signed up over time.

That's just the U.S.

I think that when we think about crypto, we try to think about this echo chamber of people we're around every day. I only see 10 people in my group chat or 15 people on my timeline, but the world is 7 billion people. There's a lot of people we can bring access to.

How do you market, though? I keep coming back to this idea. What you guys are doing is really not a new idea, but you've nailed the execution. I know you guys probably do a million things in a day, but nailing the execution really means user acquisition. Consumer trading is all a user-acquisition game. Can we go deep into user acquisition?

Yeah. We have this view that the product is the only thing that matters. Build a good product and people will come. Obviously, you need to figure out other channels to distribute it, or else it's like a tree falling in the forest—does anybody know?

But we've found great success in demoing what the app is like: “There's a token that you might like,” or, “There's this thing that you always wanted to buy but couldn't really do. Here's a platform that should let you do it really easily.” You sign up, you can see a social graph, you can follow top traders, and you can get notified.

We've really just been pitching and educating people about the product itself, as opposed to doing anything more guerrilla-like, such as going to campuses or doing things that don't scale. A lot of our effort is focused on how we build the best product and show people the product over and over and over again. When the time comes, you'll want to use the platform to buy whatever asset you're interested in.

Yeah. I don't think you can convince people they should trade, but you can convince people that if they want to trade, this is where they do it.

There’s definitely a cost-per-acquisition curve. Some people will come immediately, while others need to see you 5 times before they’re actually ready. Or maybe it’s just a timing thing: they don’t want to buy anything now, but they find out about FOMO and onboard to see someone else. Then, the next time they’re ready, they’ll come to FOMO.

We think of it as a longer-term game to really get people to the platform. We’re not trying to shove things down people’s throats. We want them to be able to come to us when they’re ready and know that we’re building a platform that’s easy to access, where they can access anything.

How many people are you guys signing up?

Right now—

We probably did 12,000.

12,000 yesterday.

That’s probably sign-ups, and then there’s a 30% conversion rate. So, you got 4,000 funded accounts.

I think yesterday was a little bit higher. We saw probably 6,000 or 7,000 deposits because that’s the distinction. If your intention is that you already know you want to buy and you come on and do the thing, that’s different from signing up and thinking, “Okay, it’s there for later.” So, we’re seeing a lot of that.

Where are these 6,000 people coming from? I’m on crypto Twitter, right? There aren’t 6,000 people on Crypto Twitter in a day signing up for a new platform.

Yeah, we had product-led growth.

There are a few different channels. We had 7,500 first deposits yesterday. I think they’re coming from word of mouth because a lot of it is referrals. You’ll tell your friend, or maybe your friend’s a trader and he’ll tell his friends, so there’s a lot of word of mouth there.

Then there’s some user-generated content on TikTok, with people making videos about the platform. What’s really cool is that the social graph is a feedback mechanism that exists in the app. Se talked about product-led growth—just building the best product—but there are also a lot of growth mechanisms built into the product, like the share cards or the FOMO cards.

For example, this guy Poor Goat got airdropped 30,000 of this Ansem coin, and now it’s worth $1.2 million. People are posting, “Wow, this guy made $1.2 million.” You don’t even need to come to the platform to trade; you’re just curious, so you come to the platform to see it for yourself. Now you’re on the platform, and when it’s time for you to trade, you’ll come and trade.

Got it. Yeah.

Oh, so the Ansem coin is actually driving a lot of users?

When there’s some virality around a long-tail coin, that’s one of the best user-acquisition mechanisms for you guys. It’s even better when it’s across multiple chains. For example, there were a couple of BNB coins that were doing really well as a byproduct of Ansem coin.

Now you’re at this place where you can trade both of these chains in under 3 seconds in one application, as opposed to needing to have 2 wallets.

I think that’s when we see the most growth, actually. Embarrassingly, I haven’t used the app yet, which I’ll have to do after this. I’ve got to get a code or something.

Does the experience feel more like MetaMask and Phantom, more like Robinhood, or like a totally different trading experience? What does it feel like, and what do you want it to do?

You merge Robinhood and Twitter in a way, but it also has an Instagram-like user experience. We try to make it very simple and graphical, so it’s easy for the user. Honestly, I think it feels like a mix of Instagram and Robinhood. That might actually be the best comparison.

I’d love to hear what your take is when you use it. Then you have the information layer from something like Twitter.

The goal is to really build our own social graph here. There’s so much lacking on FOMO. We tabled everything to build our web app and then our perps product back to back, and we haven’t really done much on the social side. People have invented so many ways to interact with the social graph that we never even imagined, so it’s kind of our obligation now to build the tooling to make this experience better.

For example, the feed is a huge opportunity. It’s really underutilized because it’s just this linear feed that’s not that helpful right now. But you can see the best companies in the world—TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram—building ranked feeds that are really personalized to you, with stuff that you want to see.

5. Fees, Perps, And Onchain Competition

Right now, if Jason joins FOMO, there will probably be a notification in the feed, but it will very quickly get buried, so people won’t see it. We want to make it so everyone sees that. You might be a good trader to follow, or you might have a thesis that Meta is going to open its compute or data-center business to other customers.

People have these theses, and today we see Meta stock up and all the cloud-provider stocks down. You could have these theses and this discovery mechanism where you can socially discover new assets.

6. Building The Social Trading Layer

What do I benefit from as a creator if I come onto the platform?

I think one benefit is joining any new platform that will hopefully be in the hands of hundreds of millions of people, with a huge asymmetric upside. Whether it’s a Logan Paul joining a new social network—

Exactly.

There are people on FOMO with over 100,000 followers already. I think there are multiple people who previously had only a few thousand followers on X and now have tens of thousands of followers on X. You’re building a personal brand there.

Can you post just like a tweet?

You can post a thesis. I think a lot of social gets lost in trading applications because you can just write, and there’s a lot of noise and no signal. On FOMO, you tie a thesis to a trade.

You might have a Bitcoin trade and think Bitcoin is going to go up because the market is booming, or you might be shorting Bitcoin because of quantum computing. Then people can like your thesis and follow you to see your new theses. Now we’re starting to build that out as the core, fundamental building block of our social product.

We’re going to add commenting and interactions. One thing that’s crazy is that we don’t even have a notification center yet. If someone likes your post, follows you, or tags you in something, you don’t even have that feedback loop yet, which is super important for a social product.

It just clicked for me why USV made this investment. They invested in a company back in 2016 called Numerai.

I remember their blog post when they made that investment. It said something along the lines of, “How can we apply the network effects that come from social-media networks to capital allocation?”

They invested in this thing called Numerai, which was like a hedge fund managed by anonymous people, and you could buy into the hedge funds. Anyway, 10 years later, it seems like maybe they got it right. I think Numerai actually did well for them.

Back to the app: if I post a trade, can people follow me into the trade?

Yes.

Will I make money by them following me into the trade, or no?

That’s what referral links are for. On the first point, not automatically. We think this is really important because, let’s say you had $1 million following your trade automatically. You’re going to trade differently. You’re not going to buy certain coins because you don’t want to have the obligation of people following you.

We build all of the tools for you to instantly find out when other people are making moves—the notifications, the feed, and so on—but we don’t want any automatic copy trading. We think it’s a downward slope, and you can manipulate it. You could buy an illiquid token and then dump on your followers. There is a social-consensus mechanism and reputation tied to it, but it’s just not something we want to play with.

Is the way most creators make money through the referral links? If you remember how Bybit grew, this is how Bybit grew, right? Through referral links. Referral links were really how Bybit became 6th, 3rd, then 2nd-biggest exchange, right?

There are people making tons of money on referrals today. We don’t have a feature where, if you trade off my information—let’s say you buy from your hot sheet—I can attribute that to you, and then you make some of my profit or some of the fees. That’s something we’re thinking about building in the future, but it doesn’t exist today.

You hit on an important point, which is that for every social graph that exists, as you get bigger, the experience is better for you. You monetize, you have more influence, and you can do these things.

What we’re thinking about there is maybe creating a Friend.tech-style gated key room or chat room where you need to subscribe or do something to get access to someone’s information and go back and forth. Maybe it’s something where you get attribution for people who follow you into trades on a fee basis, not a profit basis.

There are all these things we're thinking about, and that's kind of what social V2 or V3 would look like. But there's a lot of things we want to do because it's important that as people grow, their experience gets better and not worse.

Yeah. How did you think about onboarding—when the right time was to go to market makers and onboard liquidity?

Yeah. So today, we don't work with any market makers. We go through DEX entirely. We've had a lot of conversations. We come from an institutional background. I spent a lot of time at Deutsche Bank and dYdX onboarding crypto market makers, as well as bringing market makers into crypto.

What are other product trade-offs that you guys have made like that one—that benefit the user and not us? Anything come to mind? It sounds like Paul, you sit more on the normie-user side, whereas you're more on the trader side. As I think about building an app, there are trade-offs between what the product team would want and what the finance team would want. Are there any other trade-offs?

There's a number of things. One is USDC trading. Right now, you trade from a cash balance; you don't trade from Solana into coins, or BNB or ETH. That's a decision that I think is very rare. Nobody has said that before, right? Everybody trades out of a native gas token, but with how gas sponsorship works today, you can do that very easily. You shouldn't have to face market beta to whatever the underlying gas token is.

You have to go to cash.

USDC or cash.

USDC is cash in our app, okay?

7. Why Consumer Crypto Keeps Failing

Yeah. So, that's one. Another is that we don't let you pay gas fees; we pay that on your behalf. We pay priority fees, and it's all just based on an algorithm that we use. We don't let you set slippage or set all these things that would be very foreign to a normal user, but that a crypto user might want. There are trade-offs, right? It's not always the best experience, but we need to figure out what the right balance is. Maybe for a more advanced tool, like a web application, we can let you do these things on your own if you're a crypto trader.

Interesting.

Yeah. Another one is importing a wallet. From the early days, people were like, “We want you to be able to import a wallet to FOMO so then we can try an external platform and have it show there.” But I think there's this trust vector where, if I know that you're only trading on FOMO, then I know we have the same tooling as you. You're a normie, and you're like, “Okay, this guy doesn't have his wallet exported or imported to FOMO from this pro trading tool. We're both using FOMO.” I think that was really important to have people come participate as part of the social graph if they want to use our trading product.

That was a trade-off because we kind of let go of external growth, and I think that made the path to where we are now harder. But the benefit is instrumental to being where we are now, with everyone trading natively on FOMO.

Interesting. The business model is fee-based.

Yeah. Fifty bips.

It's 50 bips on—

Fifty bips on long-tail spot. On majors like Bitcoin, ETH, Solana, et cetera, it's only 5 basis points. So it's basically free to trade because we sponsor gas as well.

And the goal there—it was so funny. I was just demoing it recently, and I was on Robinhood. I tried demoing buying some Bitcoin, and the fees there are 85 bips each way, which is insane. You're buying Bitcoin and losing, I don't know, 3 to 5K. It was funny that on FOMO, you could basically do it for free.

I think having this non-custodial experience and giving users an experience where they can just trade majors for free if they want, but then participate in the long tail if they want to as well, is really important to us.

So the majors are 5 bps. Spot is 50 bps.

Fifty bps.

Perps are 5 bps on top of all the third-party protocol fees and stuff.

Yes. And the user pays those as well.

Yes.

Okay. And then you guys absorb the gas fees.

Yep.

Okay.

Token rent and all the other infrastructure fees.

All of that. Okay. What's bigger, spot or perps?

Sorry, what's bigger?

Spot is bigger—probably at least an order of magnitude. In terms of users, it's multiple orders of magnitude.

Yeah.

Perps only launched 2 weeks ago.

Perps is only 2 weeks old.

It's 2 weeks old and very bare-bones. There's no social features yet. We just shipped the orders yesterday. You don't get notified if I buy something, and there's no feed or interactive experience that ties everything together. These are all being shipped this week, and I think it'll create a bigger opportunity for us to get more and more people involved.

Obviously, that's an unexplored space for most of retail, so I'm really interested to see how non-U.S. users are able to tap into this on a broader scale—not just crypto natives.

Yeah, 100%. The most addicting tool I've used in the last year was a very consumer-friendly perps tool, and I don't trade that much.

But it's extremely addicting.

Interesting. Do you mind sharing what it was?

Yeah, it was—

Or what you liked about it?

I gotta find the app name because they ended up shutting down and returning investor capital, but it was built on top of Hyperliquid. Do you guys use Hyperliquid?

What's that experience been like?

Very easy, actually.

Yeah. We integrated the entire Builder Code experience in 2 and a half weeks.

Nice.

So, very frictionless. Their team is very easy to work with, and honestly, it's been great. I think they understand how to write documentation. They understand what people need from both market-making and building perspectives, so we're able to integrate pretty easily. That's been a really good experience.

Nice. Yeah. There's a leaderboard of Hyperliquid revenue for the Builder Codes. I think Phantom was near the top.

Yeah, Phantom's number 1.

Number 1. Where are you guys?

We've gone up to number 2. We're anywhere between 6 and 2 on a given day.

That's great. Do you think perps will one day overtake spot on the platform?

I think so.

Yeah.

I think as we add more spot assets, it'll balance out. It'll probably look very spot-heavy, then probably perps-heavy, and as more assets come on-chain, maybe it'll balance out again to be more even between spot and perps.

Do you think you'll end up keeping the fee? Will you monetize like this in 5 years? For a normal user, they see Robinhood as free and FOMO as 50 bps, even though that's not actually how it works under the hood. Most people don't get that.

Most of the assets that are available on FOMO for 50 bps aren't even available on Robinhood, right? Robinhood has maybe 100 to 150 crypto assets, whereas there are tens of millions of assets available on FOMO. Most of the assets available on Robinhood are available on FOMO for 5 bps.

We don't do payment for order flow. Robinhood stocks does payment for order flow. It's free, but Robinhood Crypto is 85 bps each transaction, so it's actually more than us.

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah, I wonder. My thesis for where all this goes is that all trading will go on-chain. I think all of it will—even the centralized exchanges.

Take Coinbase as an example. Coinbase will eventually either build its own DEX, buy a DEX, or take a 49% stake in a DEX based on regulations. I don't know what it looks like, but they will end up routing all trades on-chain, I think. Binance will do the same thing, and OKX will do the same thing.

I think Robinhood will end up doing the same thing. How do you guys think about competing in a world like that? Because Coinbase has 100 million users.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I think we are—this might be naive—in a pretty good position, to be honest. I think we're very young, and we're humble about that. I know that even where we are is pretty much nowhere, but we're happy with the path we're on.

8. Robinhood, X, And Copy Trading

No one has really built a native, first on-chain trading experience that consumers can access. A lot of these experiences that leverage on-chain assets will not be native, non-custodial, on-chain experiences. We're one of the first applications that allows you to have this non-custodial, on-chain experience, but it kind of feels like a regular experience above the hood. That's exactly what this should look like: crypto rails should dissolve into the background of the experience.

Crypto will not only be the underpinning of financial rails for trading. I think all value transfer will be built on it. Think about SWIFT, right? Banks have to be part of this system. The SWIFT system is when you debit one account, it notifies another bank that you've made that debit, so then it can readjust your account. It doesn't even do the value transfer. It's like you're just moving cash and then debiting a computer, and it takes 3 days to update. With crypto, you have a wallet, I have a wallet, I transact, and the ledger automatically updates. It just makes sense to be the underpinning of all financial rails.

I really agree with you that it'll happen in the next 5 to 10 years. Robinhood believes this as well, right? They just had this thesis, and they're making a lot of moves there. I think it's really great. They're going to build an amazing tokenized-equity product, and we hope to build on them and other tokenized-equity products as well. Hopefully, some of these bigger players can be the key infrastructure that helps us move toward that, and we can build an amazing on-chain experience for consumers.

Yeah, I think the other thing there is that we tend to believe the market's very efficient, right? Over some time horizon, the best product will win. In our view, everybody can come on-chain; everybody can do the same things. If tomorrow all these exchanges offer these assets through their native experience, sure, you get all these inflows and all these users, but you don't have the social graph, right?

The best traders on-chain are on FOMO, and we hope that's going to be the case for perp stocks, prediction markets, and even yield strategies. Where do you want to be? You want to be at the place where you're at the forefront of discovery, information, price discovery, and so on.

Even in a world where everybody decides to come on-chain tomorrow, we're still best-positioned because we have the best traders. We're going to continue to compound the best traders, and it's very, very transparent. As a new user, you want to be where the best people are, not where you're—

A focused social network. Yeah, interesting. Sorry, I'm held up on the business model for a second. On the fees side of things, it's the most cyclical business model in a business like yours. When Coinbase went public, they were like, “Oh, crap. Let's get out of the fees business and start doing all these other things.”

Do you have to give up net interest margin in lending and staking and payment for order flow? People don't like it, but it's a good business model. Fast-forward several years: huge business, you guys go public, and you must add more things. How do you think about that?

I think there are ways and products that you could build that would be good revenue models during down markets, that are actually beneficial to users but not extractive for them. For example, if we build FOMO Gold, we could take a certain fee every month, but then make sure that your priority fees are at the 99th percentile. No matter what, you're getting execution. Or we could give you access to group-chat features or other features on top of that that are pro features. Then you create this benefit for the user, but also a more fortified revenue stream. That's how we think about it over time.

Right now, we have USDC. There's a lot of people pitching us on building our own stablecoin and sharing yields, right? There are a lot of other ways that we can gain revenue during market downturns, but this is actually the main reason we fundraised. I think—well, there are 2 reasons. One is the great partners that we've partnered ourselves with, but second, we're taking such a big risk building this business, and we have such a long-term vision.

We understand this business is cyclical. Go look at Robinhood and Coinbase stock. Fortifying our balance sheet from these most recent fundraising rounds was specifically so that if the market does turn, we have money to build through that and succeed on the other side.

9. Expanding Beyond Trading Fees

Yeah. I mean, the good thing about this is you're raising during pretty bad crypto days right now. I'm not calling bottoms here.

One of the trends on centralized exchanges is partnering with lending-and-borrowing folks. Morpho just did this with Robinhood. Morpho has also got its vault on Coinbase, right? Veda and Kraken. Have you guys thought about what that would look like for you? What's the FOMO version of that?

Yeah, we've talked with all those guys, and it's interesting to us, right? I think that is an area where we think it fits into the FOMO vision of value transfer, value creation, value—whatever else. It's something we're directly interested in.

We don't want to commit to the timeline on that just yet, but we want to offer yield. We want to offer native yield on stablecoins. We want to offer you native yield on your USDC, your Ethereum, your Solana, your Bitcoin, or whatever else. So it's interesting to us, and hopefully we have that in the near future.

Yeah. How do you guys make product decisions? How do you prioritize products and what to build, right? You could build this yield thing, FOMO Gold, or your own stablecoin. How does this happen? Is there a Monday meeting? Does this come from one of you being technically the chief product officer? How does this actually happen internally?

No, we have a Monday meeting. Every Monday morning, the 3 of us are sitting down and looking at what's going on in the market, what feedback we're getting from users, and what we need to build that other people can't see just yet.

We try to go where the puck is skating to, and I think one of our big misses was that we weren't on BNB Chain early enough, but we were on Base early enough. We need to always be evaluating: Where did we go wrong? We have retros on what went right, what went wrong, and what we can do better for the future.

It's honestly a feel thing. We've had a pretty good pulse on the market so far, not to say it's always going to be that way. We try to use data, empirical evidence, and user feedback, and then build the right things at what we hope is the right cadence, while not losing focus on what the bigger picture is.

There's also some marginal difference about some of the small things, but the larger products we build are more obvious. It's not a marginal thing. All 3 of us are like, “Okay, we have to do this.”

On the social product features recently, we were like, “We haven't touched this for a while. This is really important. Let's do it.” Perp stocks are launching; we have to do it. On the web, we need to build this experience as a foundation for our spot and perp trading business going forward. We need to have this other platform, and that'll be an important foundation that we can build upon.

I think we're doing it in the correct order, in our eyes, but there will probably be harder decisions in the future. I'm confident that the 3 of us can come to a decision through consensus.

How would you make a decision like the stablecoin one?

I think we would look at all the different partners: what the yield opportunity is, what the architecture is, where it's custodied, and how it's controlled. Pairs are really important because you're doing all these liquidity pools, right?

We would need—I guess you really only need a good pair of your native stablecoin and Solana, because then you could route that into any coin. But we'd think about what the liquidity of the pairs is, who the partner is, whether we enjoy working with the team, and whether they're technically compatible with our team.

Do you think you guys want your own stablecoin, or is it easier to just—

I mean, USDC has the liquidity, right? So—

It feels easier to be like, “Hey, Circle guys, we're talking to Agora, M0, Bridge, and all these guys, but I'd really rather stick with USDC. Can you just give us 90%, or you're almost going to force us to leave?”

Yeah. I mean, some businesses are much more staunch than you think they would be. I feel like they're not as willing to change their business model as you think they should to work with partners.

The ones that are willing to work more with us, I think, are the ones that we'll end up working with more closely.

Yeah. Yeah, interesting. How big is the team?

Like 20 now. 17, yeah. Under 20 for sure. We've got a few hires joining us soon and a few things in the works, so roughly 18 people.

Nice. How much money—how much did you guys just raise?

$75 million.

$75 million. What will you do with that money?

I'm sure there's the slide in the deck, right? And there's the conversation with the investor. They're like, “All right, Paul, what are you going to go do with the money?” And you're like, “Oh, we need to hire. We want to make a little acquihire. There's a team here we want to bring in.” And they're like, “Great. That gets you to $15 million. What about the other $60 million?”

Yes. So, I mean, we have more money than we ever raised. I think we've been profitable. A lot of it is opportunistic for us, in the sense that these are the right partners building the right business and bringing the right partners on board. I think part of it is also defensive, in the sense that if the market turns, now we have this balance sheet.

We are going to ramp up our spend on growth. We're not going to do it all at once, but we will do it intentionally. There's a lot of fruit that's a little bit higher on the tree, costs a little bit more, but has a huge return, right?

Like what?

Even thinking just through CAC on UGC, you can basically get a user for a certain dollar amount, but maybe there's another user that costs more to acquire, but their lifetime value is higher than their CAC, right? So, as long as the lifetime value is higher than the CAC, then you're willing to spend even more to acquire them. We haven't moved up on that curve at all yet.

We talked about vertical integration. There are certain things that we're thinking about bringing in-house. I don't think it's immediate, but hiring on that front and working more closely with other teams is going to be somewhat capital-intensive.

Those are the main things.

10. Funding Growth Through Market Cycles

I'm not sure if you guys have thought about this much, so we can skip the question if you haven't, but there's a really interesting decision that a marketer has to make in crypto around CAC and acquiring users. You guys actually have very little competition when you're trying to acquire users in a bear market, because no one else is spending money. But user intent is very low.

In a bull market, user intent is extremely high, but there's extremely high competition as well. How do you think about capital allocation in that environment?

I think it has to scale, right? The thing you hit on, which I think a lot of people miss, is you can't force people to be interested in something, right? You see that experience at Coinbase, at Robinhood, at pretty much any trading app that's ever existed. When people are not interested, they are not interested, right?

There are 2 frameworks there. One is you either continue to spend the same amount of money in bear and bull markets, and you're kind of buying goodwill in the bear market, where you're making these impressions. Maybe they see you for the 3rd or 4th time, and then the 5th time in the bull market, they're a lot more excited about where you are. That's one way to do it.

The other is you completely stop spending in the bear market, and then in the bull market, you ramp it up significantly. Truthfully, we've never seen a bull market, so it's hard to tell what that actually looks like for us.

If you just think about supply and demand, even in a bull market, there's going to be a lot more content creators and a lot more people interested in onboarding people, whether it's through their own channels or partnerships or whatever. Naturally, you expect that to increase, and there's obviously a lot more competition on that front as well. But we hope that the product itself is going to be the driver of what people want to use and experience on a daily basis.

What's the revenue share? How do you convince a creator to come on, and how much money would you give the big people? Let's say Ansem's like, “I'm looking for an exclusive deal.” Will you give him $5 million? Give him $1 million?

What's been really cool—and not to dodge the question, but what's really cool—is people would pay TJR so much money to be on their platform, but he naturally came to FOMO because he has this coin he wants to talk about, he wants to share his thesis, and he wants the public to see him holding it. There's no other platform to do that besides FOMO.

People could go to an EOA wallet and type in his alphanumeric string, but I can come to FOMO, just type TJR, and see his trade in real time in this beautiful feed with the thesis, et cetera. So I think there are very few products that actual users and audiences want to convert to.

These guys want to make money monthly, but they also want to actually talk about products that their audiences want to use, because their personal brand is everything they have. They don't want to tarnish it. I think we're in a nice position where we're working with creators that just want to come to our platform organically.

We want to give them all the support through our in-house media platform, like we're talking about, and all these other things to help them grow their businesses, right? We know all these token teams. We have this UGC arm. We could help them build their personal brand. So, it's a win-win there.

Yeah. And so what would you pay?

I think we're very intentional. We're trying to be very methodical about what the cost per impression is, what the CAC is, what LTV is, et cetera. Truthfully, we just don't pay traders to come onto the platform. We sponsor content.

We work with about 8 or 9 people exclusively on content, right? We don't tell them they have to trade on the platform. They don't have to do XYZ. So, it's very different.

You would sponsor Threadguy's streams, but you wouldn't pay Threadguy to come on the platform.

Yeah. That's something that everybody does in crypto, even outside of crypto, that we've been very public about, whether you believe it or not. We don't pay people to trade on the platform or even really talk about it.

We sponsor content because we think that's something that's really interesting. We have this vision of owned media, and it's something that's very important for the education space, right? Would we pay him $1 million? Probably not. Would we pay him a fraction of that? Maybe.

But it's hard to tell, right? Our growth budget right now is not that big, transparently. It's under—

Probably what most people expect by quite a lot.

We rent those dollars.

Yeah. I mean, Ren is the analytical tool, right? He's like, “This isn't going to work. I don't think that this makes sense.”

He says no a lot.

That's what you want from him. Most marketers want to say yes to that.

Yeah, that's good.

Who's a bigger competitor, Robinhood or Twitter?

It's a good question. I'd say Robinhood because we're trading-first. X, or Twitter, has a massive business around media that isn't just financial media, right? Over time, hopefully FOMO becomes this financial media platform. But X has so much other content. So, probably Robinhood.

Do you think X will work as a trading platform?

It's interesting because I think we've talked about this pretty early on. Why don't you just let people trade through X, right? I think you run into a whole slew of issues: Where do you route to? Can you do on-chain wallets? Do you have to use centralized partnerships with brokerages like eToro, Robinhood, Interactive Brokers, or whoever?

I think they've gone that latter route, which is they've started to partner with a lot of these centralized entities. It's hard to scale that, right? If you're an anonymous person on Twitter and you trade on-chain, are you really going to give that up to come give all your information to this platform, share it with whoever else, connect your bank account, and do all these things? It's a little bit more friction.

I think that works to our benefit, because the best traders will stay on-chain. We have the benefit of attracting the best talent and having trickle-down effects of that.

How do you think about copy trading? Copy trading has this dark pattern that tends to develop, and Paul, you mentioned this briefly, but maybe we can go a little deeper, where the best traders get a ton of followers and then either their entries basically get front-run, or, even worse, it becomes a vehicle to dump on their followers. They use their followers as exit liquidity.

How do you—is that preventable, or is that just the nature of how social and trading come together?

Well, I actually think social, if it’s fully transparent, is a mechanism that works against this. I think the transparency helps prevent this.

Because the reputation’s on the line.

Well, there’s a reputation, and there are stats like average hold time and all these things. On FOMO, you go to someone’s profile and see their average hold time on a coin, so you understand if they’re someone who’s just going to dump on you minutes later or if they’re someone who actually holds for the long term. Social reputation is huge, and I think that’s really important because you can say, “You can go make another wallet,” but if you build up this social reputation over time and have hundreds of thousands of followers, are you going to burn that for one trade?

This is why we don’t do automatic copy trading, because the social reputation still fights against that. It maybe gives you more of an excuse where you’re like, “I just want to buy this coin and sell it.” If you see someone buy something and a bunch of people buy behind them, I think it’s really important that people can see your average hold time and these things in the holder section on the app. Then you can keep your social credibility over time.

Yeah, interesting. Remember when Friend.tech basically auto-added everybody?

Yeah. I don’t know if you guys followed that closely, but they auto-added people to the platform—or no, BitClout.

BitClout. I don’t know if you remember BitClout. They auto-added people, and you’d go and claim your money. I was on the platform; I never signed up, but they added me to the platform.

You could do something like this. I’m thinking about Arthur Hayes, who’s on Twitter all the time right now talking about his trades and dumping and stuff like that. You could add Arthur and be like, “Hey, you’ve got this pool of money waiting for you on there. Go claim it.” That connects his wallet.

I think this gives crypto a little bit of a bad reputation because this is what coins do. Like a launchpad: “Claim the creator fees.” Then you have people in your DMs saying, “Claim the fees, claim the fees.” You saw the OpenClaw guy, right? He was on the Lex Fridman podcast roasting crypto because everyone was in his DMs trying to claim these fees, and his whole Twitter was flooded with people claiming them.

We thought about it, and there could be a good mechanism where you could track someone’s wallet. Maybe they get some of the fees, et cetera. But we’re starting to see a lot of these top traders already move to FOMO organically, and that’s working really well.

We’re in it for the long term. Se and I want to build this for the next decade. We want to build an app that is hopefully the best trading app that ever existed, and you’re just going to want to be on there. This applies to our content partners, too. This is why we never pay anyone to trade. We know that’s not sustainable. We don’t pay you to trade; you come on the platform. We want to build a platform that’s so good you don’t want to trade anywhere else.

That’s true for the biggest traders, our content creators, and anyone else. So, yeah, I think that’s why we would avoid a mechanism like that.

Yeah, interesting. Do you guys pull in data from wallet tracking? Is it Arkham and Nansen, or do you try to build everything in-house?

It’s all native for all of our data.

Yep.

Interesting. That’s cool. That’s cool. Can you tell me about the media arm? Paul, I think you tweeted something about wanting to build this huge army of creators, with 30–40 people right now. Se, I think you said you have 9 right now.

9 on X.

Okay. I think Paulie said you want to build one of the largest media arms of any tech company.

Yeah.

Very similar to that, I saw it and was nodding my head and agreeing with it. That’s been the Blockworks thesis for a while: if you own this huge owned audience, you can then drive the audience and the customers into your product, right? You can actually have either extremely low customer acquisition costs or basically no customer acquisition costs. How do you develop that thesis a little more for me?

Yeah. I think media is in 2 forms. One is internal to the app because we’re obviously a social media platform, where the media is the trades and the thesis, right?

Because it’s not like TikTok, where you’re showing your face and all of these things. It’s more trading-related, and the trade is the featured thing, which makes it more like X, an idea-discovery platform, rather than an influencer platform like Instagram. But I do think you want these people to be able to build their personal brands.

When we can create a media arm external to the business, whether it’s 7–9 podcasts, media relationships, or even our UGC arm, which is also a media business, we’re distributing wide media that looks very organic to a large group of people on TikTok, Instagram, et cetera. We can then leverage that for our partners and for our creators on our platform.

We’ve talked about how you can leverage your media arm to help businesses. Our idea is that instead of businesses, the creators on the product are the businesses. We talk about this a lot, but what killed Clubhouse was that they had this organic ecosystem. You saw Marc Andreessen talking on a Sunday about random things, and you were like, “That’s amazing.” Then they brought all these celebrities in, and it kind of killed the platform because all of the organic creators left after they got consumed by these celebrities.

It’s really important for us to think through which FOMO creators—the Remis, the Iceman, or now the Poor Goat—make these big trades and start to gain a big following on the platform. How can we use our media arm to help grow their personal brands off-platform?

Poor Goat. I’m looking this guy up.

Number-two trader on FOMO on the 24-hour leaderboard.

Yeah, that’s very cool. Frank DeGods.

Yeah, Frank as well.

Nice. Chang at LogX.

Yeah.

Celebrities.

Yeah, exactly.

That’s cool. That’s cool. Did you guys launch with Apple Pay?

We didn’t, no.

How big was Apple Pay?

That was our big 10x growth event.

Was it adding Apple Pay?

Yeah.

Interesting.

Not immediately—maybe a couple of weeks after.

So why doesn’t everyone do Apple Pay?

I think there’s—

Well, they should, right?

Yeah, yeah. I think that’s still the biggest bottleneck in crypto by far. How do you get money onto the platform without giving up your life, right? There’s now progressive KYC, so you can do some amount of money with nothing but an email and then scale up over time. There are different providers and different geographies.

Onboarding is one of those things that I don’t think people pay enough attention to, primarily as a byproduct of most crypto users using crypto products. So why do we care about normies? For us, we’ve been trying to add as many on-ramps as possible. Whether you’re in Indonesia, New York, Italy, or wherever, you should be able to access the crypto blockchain in its purest form.

Apple Pay is something we’ve put a lot of effort into. There are partners we work with there, and there’s stuff we’re doing on the banking side, the debit side, and all of the different mechanisms that exist globally. It’s done well for us, and we would encourage consumer apps to try to do more onboarding mechanisms generally.

Yeah, yeah. If U.S. regulations got even friendlier, would you guys do custodial? You have a non-custodial wallet, which obviously helps from a regulatory perspective. Would you do custodial if the regulations were a little more friendly?

I think non-custodial is just the better architecture here.

We’re not dogmatic about these things. We just want to build the best product experience for our users. I do think a lot of these normie users would actually be fine with KYC. Even beyond that, getting funds onto the platform and into crypto is hard, but the success rates—even if you do KYC—are really low.

That’s a bummer because people just want to get money onto these platforms fairly easily. I will say that we’ve seen a lot of improvement there, and I do think that in the next few years this will be a solved issue and a commodity. That’ll be great for us because it’s not a competitive advantage. We just want people to be able to trade on FOMO.

On your question, we’re not dogmatic about it. We’d be willing to build products like that if we think it’s the best product experience, but right now we feel pretty confident that the non-custodial experience is the best one.

Nice. This is maybe a boring question for listeners, but out of personal curiosity, what are the infrastructure providers that you guys use to run the company? You have Hyperliquid for perps. What’s the embedded wallet? Is it Privy? What are the other infrastructure providers?

For routing, it’s Jupiter, DFlow, and OKX on Solana; 0x and maybe a couple of others on EVM. We work with a solver, and we work with Relay on the cross-chain swaps.

A bunch of people on the on-ramp: Coinbase, Stripe, and Crossmint on the Apple Pay stuff. Am I missing anyone?

Yeah. And then Defined or Codex for data, and Mobula for data.

And then a couple of others. We try to work with as many people as possible across all domains.

I think a lot of this technology didn't exist even then.

That's what I'm saying. What you guys had to do—probably not a single one of those actually existed when you guys were a DEX.

Most of them did not, at least not in their current form.

Not in their current form, yeah, exactly.

That's great. Tokenized equities—do you guys have them on the platform?

11. The Everything Trading App

We have a few. I mean, by “we have a few,” I just mean anything that's onchain you can trade, right? We're a platform that lets you tap into any asset that's available in a liquidity pool, so you can trade these things today. I think this is something we're really interested in, and we want to get better educated on how we provide this experience for the user. There are a lot of edge cases.

Pretty crappy user experience today, like 7 or 8 versions of SpaceX.

Right, and there are a lot of edge cases. If a company gives dividends, how do you actually go fix that token price? You need to do manual work on the front end to reconcile these things. I think there will be a more uniform standard for how you deal with dividends, reinvestments, or whatever it is. But for now, we're trying to get educated and offer the best experience.

So basically, you guys offer any onchain asset?

Yes.

Okay, so as equities move onchain, you'll be able to offer equities. As prediction markets move onchain, you can offer prediction markets.

Yep.

Okay. Do you guys have prediction markets today?

No, not yet.

One day.

Yeah, it's something we're thinking about.

Would you guys build internally, or is that a partnership with Kalshi?

I think it's a similar model to how we look at it today, where we'll work with a partner.

Yeah.

Nice. I guess Kalshi or Polymarket. What did we miss, guys? We've covered a lot. Biggest priority for FOMO in 2026?

That's a long year. There's still 5 months left. I think one of the things we want to nail home is that we're not trying to be this everything app, right? We want to be an app where our slogan is “Never miss out again.” Anything you can think of wanting, hopefully we're a step ahead of you. Yield, prediction markets, perps, stocks, tokenized equities—whatever it is, we want to be the place where you think about your interest in doing something and we already have it. That's the way we think about everything, and that's being very intentional. That doesn't mean we have a 401(k), a credit card, this and that and the third. We want to be very specific about what we add so that it's very clear what FOMO's value proposition to you is as a user.

Are you encumbered, then, by how quickly things move onchain? You want to go to FOMO for anything you want to buy. I want to buy some copper. I want to buy 3x-levered copper or something, but I can't buy it because it's not onchain. So are you beholden to what's available onchain?

Yeah. I think you'd be surprised by the velocity at which these things are moving, especially TradeXYZ moving all these assets on perps. There are, like, 5 tokenized equity platforms announced in the past year that are all starting to add a ton of assets. So, yes, we're encumbered by that, but the velocity is very promising. If there was ever a time to build, it's now.

I think the one thing I would cover, based on what Se said, is that the social is the glue, right? You could express a thesis and use these instruments as a mechanism. I talked about Meta earlier, but there was that 1 day when Meta said, “Okay, we're going to use our excess compute for distributing to other businesses.” You saw Meta stock rip and all these other stocks fall.

Now I can get context instead of looking and missing it in The New York Times. I can come to FOMO. I see this feed that's ranked. I see all these theses, like Jason actually bought Meta, realizing this was going to happen a week ago. He made a thesis, and now the thesis is becoming true. I can discover that. Then I follow Jason because he's smart and he's going to have good theses in the future. I could see everyone else who had that thesis, and I could start to understand what's happening in the market and then position myself.

I think in the age of AI, everyone is thinking about these trading interfaces that people can just use information through and then execute trades. But the edge of execution is actually going to get evened out and commoditized. If we both have the same platform and the same access to information, what actually becomes important is the research. You could use AI as a research tool, but then you still have to cohere and understand what the trade should be.

Humans reason through repetition and through analogy. So a social trading platform where I could actually gain information by seeing what other people are doing and learning in real time what's going on—we believe that'll be the future of discovery of financial information and trade information. So I think that's really important. You talk about other business lines: in a world where all alpha discovery happens on FOMO, you could just have a paid API where every agent, every infrastructure platform, and every trading platform needs to be able to subscribe to it, similar to a data-platform subscription of some sort.

Yeah, yeah. I like it.

For our proprietary data, and then maybe you can use an exchange—

Yeah. The exchanges make a ton of money selling their data. Not in crypto yet—they will. In traditional markets, I mean, Nasdaq is a multibillion-dollar data business.

Right?

12. Crypto, Tokens, And Going Public

Yeah. And I even think I'm bullish on Figma. I think it's a hot take because everyone's like, “Oh, cloud design,” et cetera. But you could have AI make a design for you, and what I want is to generate a vector file that I could play around with in Figma. It's the same on FOMO. Maybe I have AI execute a trade, but I want that trade to appear on my FOMO profile. I want to have this beautiful view where I could view it in real time and keep updated on it. I think that balance is really important. I'm very bullish on user interfaces and building great products for users, and I think Figma's doing that. That's kind of FOMO's view on it as well.

Yeah, I tend to agree with that. A friend, Qiao Wang, who runs Alliance DAO—I saw his tweet earlier today. He said, “I think over a 3-year time horizon, crypto will meaningfully outperform stocks.” Agree or disagree?

Starting today?

I would agree.

Agree. Starting today, agree.

Starting today, agree. At least, I mean, you see alts always go up and go down, and a lot of them die. But I think core assets that are going to be of real value to investors and traders will meaningfully outpace them.

Why do you so strongly agree?

Well, I think stocks have run up a lot recently, and I think it's 1 of 2 views. I think we're either overleveraged in our view of how impactful AI will be, or very underleveraged, in which case it exponentially rips. If we're overleveraged, then we're kind of predicting all of these sales of future cash flows for compute, et cetera. There are a lot of things in the supply chain that could be bottlenecks to that, whether it's scaling energy or scaling compute. Whereas crypto, I think, is at a local minimum for sure.

Yeah. I think my view on it also is that you think about the technology being developed and just how the stock market works today. We're now at this really awkward place where companies are refusing to go public until they're valued at $5 billion, $10 billion, $50 billion, or $1.7 trillion, or whatever SpaceX was. So it creates this really weird problem: how do you get access to that?

I think the answer is crypto. I think it's through pre-IPO perps, through places like Hyperliquid, where price discovery natively happens. You saw it with Cerebras, and you saw it with SpaceX. I think that continues to happen, and what ends up happening is that the life cycle of the trade just gets earlier and earlier and earlier. I think that can only happen on crypto rails.

So now, where does the value accrue? It's to whoever is housing all these things and the platforms that can do it for the normal person a year earlier than whatever the actual public IPO is. On that view alone, a lot of these stocks are just going to be a little bit overweight by the time they actually go through IPO and into the public market.

Yeah, versus crypto allows you to do these things much, much earlier. Yeah, yeah, I agree with all that. Will you guys launch a token?

No plans for that.

No, there's no plan for that.

Would you guys—you think it's more likely you go public or more likely you launch a token? I know we're talking years in the future. You don't have to have an answer now, but—

Yeah, probably the former.

Go public.

Yeah, I think when you launch a token, it becomes the entire product. We still have to do these other companies. If we were ever to do something like that, we’d want it to be a compliant way where you actually have ownership of the product, et cetera. It’s basically a representation of ownership of the platform, because I think when that’s divorced, that model has proven not to work out time and time again.

You don’t think that the dual model can work—equity and token? It’s a very hot topic today with Venice, obviously, and other stuff.

It’s tough. Historically, it really hasn’t, right? A lot of that is regulation. They don’t let you actually do these things in a way that’s compliant with whatever frameworks exist today.

The other point about being a trading app that people need to trust is you kind of need to be in the public market, right? You need to be able to be offered as an individual stock, part of ETFs, part of whatever indices. That builds a lot of trust with consumers.

I’m not sure that Robinhood or Coinbase, if they weren’t public, would have as many users, because there’s a fundamental trust with, “Hey, there’s a regulatory body here that’s making sure they’re doing the right things, they’re staying compliant, and everybody can see it publicly.” So that’s an important aspect as well, but there’s a lot of nuance there. Obviously, we’re excited to see how regulation continues to shift over the years.

Yeah, nice. Anything that we didn’t talk about that you guys want to cover?

There’s one thing on that point that’s really funny, which is that we worked at an investment bank for a little bit. When you’re IPOing, you have the biggest investment bank with the massive Rolodex actually run a roadshow for you—for distribution and liquidity. No one has ever done that for a crypto token.

The silly thing to me is, why don’t these things work out? You have this one guy in-house going to these random, smaller crypto market makers, having these really unfair deals that are just going to crash the token price, rather than creating a sustainable model that has taken us decades to work out in traditional financial markets.

I think that financing and distribution for actually going public—maybe eventually, for token launches, it converges to what it looks like for an IPO—but right now, I think there’s no mechanism to actually do that, right?

Have you thought about whether you could compete with some of the centralized exchanges for listings?

Well, everything’s automatically available on FOMO, and we don’t actually do any listing. Verification is just a nominal review to help protect consumers. It’s like, “This is not a scam token.” That’s the main use case of that.

Yeah. I think with the IPO roadshow, if I’m launching a token—

It might actually be better to launch on—

—you know, FOMO today than a second-tier exchange.

Yeah. So—

I think it is.

Yeah.

Because we don’t charge you a dime for it either. It’s just available.

Oh, that’s what I’m saying. Yeah, exactly. There’s so much money going into these deals.

Congrats on everything. You’ve been running the company for 18 months now. Amazing to see what you guys have done, and, yeah, rooting for you guys.

Yeah, a little over 18 months. Appreciate it. Thanks for having us.

Cool. Cheers.