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I recently downloaded @fomo because I think this business is going to be certainly one of the more talked about companies in coming months in the venture world, congrats to the whole team on raising/announcing the recent $75m fundraise - awesome accomplishment. For those who are less deep, Fomo was started by three ex operators at dydx. @dYdX is hyperliquid competitor that actually got started before Hyperliquid back in 2017.

From my research it looks like dydx pivoted into perps and was one of the market leaders as late as 2024, but ultimately got outcompeted. There's probably some digging to do and a story to tell for another day but ce la vie. In any event, Fomo is pretty cool. You download the app and (presumably) a non-custodial wallet gets created for you via Privy and the first thing that happens in app is you are prompted to sync your profile on Twitter/X (can't help myself, twitter will always be twitter to me) which makes sense given that the goal for the business inherently seems to be social, and in one of the co-founders own words, "the goals is for it [Fomo] not to be seen as a crypto app"

I can separate out a long term vision, and a current state reality but the reality of the current state is that the app very much feels like a crypto app today. You login to the home screen and you immediately see quotes and price movements for BTC, ETH, BNB, XRP, SOL, TRX, HYPE, etc. I always describe my self as a Crypto 201 player/student so what I love about the app so far is the feed that they have, specifically the market recap (that looks daily). Crypto, much like any other corner of finance, has it's own specific language so if you don't operate in crypto 24/7, if you aren't crypto native, if you aren't a true DEGEN - it can be tough to actually get a true sense of what's going on and how the ecosystem works.

The market recap, which is produced by the Fomo team is awesome because it reads like a smart, sensible market participant wrote it in plain english instead of some of the weirder lexicon that comes out of crypto. Maybe most importantly from the market recap feature, I learned something - and I learned specifically that there are two memecoins and that seem to be some amount of a center of attention within the deep degen crypto ecosystem. in particular had a "mega +2,100% rally over the past 24 hours"

This leads me to the next component of Fomo I find interesting which is the leaderboard. Fomo literally ranks and shows investor performance over a daily, weekly, monthly, and all time lookback. The most profitable trader/user on Fomo has made $1.9m since joining in January, has made 519 trades, and has an average 3 day and 2 hour average hold time, oh and you can look through the ENTIRETY of their trade history

A few things that stick out to me about the business:

1/ what I loved about testing and downloading the app is that I wasn't forced into buying anything or linking an account or taking an action right at the beginning. I think way too many companies, as well as people, investors, founders, operators, in general, have human nature that wants outcomes on short timelines. It's how we're wired, I guess, to a certain extent. The way that FOMO as an app is designed is: if you know what you're doing and you know what you're getting into, you can get value out of that immediately through the UX and UI of the app itself. If you don't know what you're doing, there's enough room for you to navigate, feel your way around, and figure out what you want to do. I deeply appreciate that, and I think it's an underrated aspect of why there's probably a lot of positive buzz about the company in general.

2/ this business clearly is going to be on a path forward of trying to be the everything app for finance. You can see that's the general direction of all these businesses are headed. I've been calling of these businesses "alt brokers" and I'm loosely categorizing them as the new age brokerage businesses founded after 2020 but really most likely after 2022. The reason why their "alt" is because there's such a wide variety of asset types that any individual person can invest in, whether it's traditional stocks, perps, crypto, onchain credit, or digital assets more broadly. It doesn't make sense that any individual user (especially men) between the ages of 25 - 40 likely has a decent amount of money spread between Robinhood, Coinbase, Vanguard, and other applications. And then if they're actually HNW they probably have a good chunk of $$$ sitting with an RIA. Fomo is a wolf in sheeps' clothing and the crypto design/direction/orientation that they have is certainly going to mature over the next 24 - 36 months

3/this business is unimpeachably further evidence of the value of programmability and digital assets. I suspect that one of the core engagement mechanisms for this business is their leaderboard. It creates both credible social proof as well as powers the in app notifications that are likely driving engagement for this company. You don't get that without being onchain. Yes, you could do it in a custodial wallet, but obviously a non-custodial wallet gives the end user more confidence and control over their funds.

When I first started digging into more of this crypto ecosystem I really though of onchain programmability as linear. Programmability enables net new assets, new assets create new markets, new markets create new pools of risk, new pools of risk create trading activity, trading activity creates attention, attention brings new users to the market - end of story. I think this definitely true and will continue to persist in the crypto ecosystem, but I also think that onchain programmability should also increasing be thought of as enabling new features. Whether it's new features or new assets, the ending point you want to get to in this ecosystem is the same which is to get people trading, and credit to the Fomo team - they've certainly figured something out. Latest figures I've found point toward +625k users, $4 billion in cumulative trading volume, and probably somewhere north of $20m run rate revenue.

Huge credit to the team of getting this far and string together likely hundreds of correct, compounding decisions to get to where they are today. As I said at the top of this post - this is definitely going to be one to watch