Fomo Is Leading the Charge for Social Trading's Next Wave

This week, trading app Fomo announced its close of a $75 million Series B, an outlier in a funding market where rounds that size have gone quiet.

Most raises are not pulling nine figures right now, and the ones that are tend to sell institutional infrastructure, not a trading app built for normal people. So the round is worth taking note of.

It only makes sense once you see what Fomo actually is: the latest, and so far the most successful, product in a long evolution of social trading.

Trading Is Already Social

As those in crypto know, investing increasingly originates from feeds. Instead of consulting brokers, investors, particularly younger ones, turn to Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit.

Nowhere is this more the case than in crypto given how central Twitter is to our industry, directing flows just as much as it does discussion and interaction. And because all of it happens onchain, where wallets and balances are public, the dynamic only sharpens. Traders follow KOLs, watch wallets, track what they're buying, and try to front-run where liquidity moves next.

To do so, they stitched together Twitter feeds, wallet trackers, terminals, Telegram bots, and a DEX interface. This put a barrier around the great game of speculation: most people weren't able or willing to go to those lengths.

Fomo, and other apps like it, intend to change that.

Fomo Packages the Feed

Fomo's founder Se Yong Park, who recently came on the Bankless podcast, calls the app "trading for the rest of us."

The app collapses the whole social stack traders used to assemble by hand into one feed: discovery, execution, identity, reputation, public theses, and visible buys and sells. You sign in with Google or Apple, fund with Apple Pay, a debit card, a bank transfer, or crypto, and start trading without ever touching a wallet, gas, a bridge, or a chain you have to think about.

Out of the 650,000 signups Fomo's had so far, roughly 30% converted into traders, so close to 200,000 people have ever placed a trade. About 70,000 of them arrived through traditional fiat onramps rather than crypto rails, showcasing the success of Fomo's formula in expanding past the already tapped out, crypto-native crowd.

Fomo’s $75M Bet on Making Crypto Trading Mainstream on Bankless

The future of trading is social

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Fomo is by no means the only company building for this new era of investing. In May we saw the release of Robinhood Social in beta, a feed for finding and tracking trades and traders. Elsewhere in crypto, Bullpen and Legend Trade continue to develop perpetuals trading into something like a sport while paste.trade is translating financial content (podcasts, newsletters) into an ever-updating feed of trades to tail.

Everywhere companies are understanding that discovery has moved upstream, out of charts and reports and into social interfaces, and they're adapting accordingly.

The Feed Doesn't Remove the Game

The advantages of embracing these changes are real.

As a user, I'd say Fomo's app goes a long way toward making trading easier and legible, with the added benefit of not having to camp on Twitter for trades. But transitioning trading into these social environments does not change the game underneath it.

Trading (also known as speculating) is a very PvP dynamic, particularly onchain and, as such, people will exploit every edge they have, including selling on their followers. It's the classic exit-liquidity problem which apps like Fomo can improve, though not erase.

Just because someone's on Fomo doesn't mean they can't accumulate tokens from private wallets, buy publicly on Fomo to broadcast conviction, and exit as soon as followers arrive. Se acknowledges this and hopes "radical transparency" can help here as, in theory, if people get continually burned by following a particular account, they will stop doing so.

I do think, however, these risks are the price of admission for memes, a disappointing reality anyone trading memes has to accept.

Where We Go Next

That is the problem a maturing platform has reason to solve.

Any app that collapses discovery, identity, and execution into one surface inherits a new job: keeping its environment honest. As Fomo scales, it is not hard to imagine social trading apps borrowing from the market-surveillance playbook used by platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi: onchain analytics that flag suspicious wallet activity, coordinated trading, or accounts whose public behavior does not match the flows around them.

But monitoring only goes so far. The deeper variable is the instrument itself, because each market comes with its own degree of perceived or real fairness. Memecoins and prediction markets sit at the fragile end of that spectrum. Both can be shaped by insiders, coordinated promotion, asymmetric information, and narratives that turn before the average user understands what happened. Perps on larger assets sit closer to the fair end. They are still risky, but they are less dependent on hidden deployer behavior, bundled launches, or opaque coordination. That makes them an arguably cleaner surface for social trading: users can take a view quickly, follow other traders, and build public track records around markets that are harder to manipulate (good that Fomo recently added them).

Overall, the real risk is not any single bad actor. It’s users collectively deciding the game cannot be won. Not every meme launch is a cabal, not all prediction markets turn on insider information, and sharp traders can learn to separate fair games from rigged ones. But keeping the game winnable is what these platforms ultimately have to protect, a mission which I expect we’ll see deeper investment in as feeds absorb more and more trading platforms.