Fomo Co-Founders on Building the Social Network for Finance

Transcript

Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is forformational purposes only and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice or necessarily the views of Blockworks. Our hosts, guests, and the Blockworks team may hold positions in the companies, funds or projects discussed. All right, everyone. Very excited about this one. Have been wanting to do this for a little bit. Time is right. Uh coming off the back of a big raise, $550 million valuation. We've got the co-founders of FOMO. Two of the three co-founders right?

>> Paul say we're missing one. Pashawn. >> Pashawn. All right. Well, love goes out to Pashawn. >> Yeah. What does Pashawn do? How do you guys split your roles? >> So Pashawn is our head of engineering and he built the first version of the mobile app. Um Se and I used to handle everything else that's not engineering. Luckily, we're able to specialize a little bit more because we hired a head of finance recently and some other roles, but say and I do product um we do BD, we do growth, uh we did some op stuff and we're handing a lot of that off now. Um but I think the main differentiator comes in our perspective, not necessarily the work. So say is a trader and he's been a trader for a long time and I'm more of this like normie user and there's always this pushpull in

every product decision we make where say 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? >> Oh every every product decision. >> Yeah. Every single day. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. We uh I think that's like the beauty of it. It's like it's a push and pull. So, you know, I I don't always try to bias towards a trader, but in a lot of ways, it's like, okay, this is what I've seen in the market. This is just what's easy, intuitive, but then it's something that, you know, the user might not understand if they've never seen crypto before. So, we we I wouldn't even just say it's us, too. It's pretty much everybody on our entire team has Product

Sense. So, we'll just like get up and in the middle of the day have like a 30-minute conversation about like a very small feature or like a small polish item. And, you know, it might seem small in the moment, but these things really add up. So, yeah, you know, we really uh go deep into every single thing that we ship and it Okay, so take take us back because Paul I think you messaged me when was that for the when you guys raised this party round of like it was like 100 150 angels >> probably February January February >> of maybe even yeah January 2025 >> 2025 okay you guys both worked at DYDX >> so yeah we both worked at DYDX for about four years joined like a couple months after me um and yeah then I was just taking some time off started uh

iterating on some ideas and I took like a birthday trip with some friends to Joshua Tree and we were like thinking about some ideas and then we decided to start building. We actually incorporated on Janu I think December 30th 2024 like the last day of the year and then we started raising the round early January 2025. >> Nice. Why did you guys structure it as that party round? >> Yeah, I think it's really important for a consumer product to build distribution. So instead of having like one institutional anchor, we want both to have be able to leverage all these different partners, whether they're builders, etc., but then also have some early traders that'll be testers and loyal users of the product to have ownership as well. So that was the main reason.

>> Did it work? >> Yeah, I think it worked pretty well. It helped us bootstrap. >> Yeah, because the hardest thing with consumer, especially a marketplace like a social trading app, is building a two-sided market. It's like a chicken egg problem because you need new traders, right, to like fund, but then you also need the top traders to provide information. So, being able to kind of do that both at once was the only way we could bootstrap. >> Yeah. Yeah. Makers and takers. >> Exactly. Yeah. Um, all right. Before we get into too deep into FOMO, let me let's talk I mean, you guys have been in crypto for a while, so I'd love to just hear like almost state of the union on a couple things. One is um one is just consumer crypto. Like, why do you there have been many many many takes at

consumer crypto. Why do you guys think you guys are the I mean I feel like you're the first really big breakout consumer crypto app in I'm trying to think of the last couple ones. I mean we had like friend tech for a little bit was like very hot and then you know very dead. Um so there's a couple you can list off but you guys are the first like first good one in a while. Why do you guys think so many consumer crypto companies didn't work out? >> I think a lot of it is cryptoconumer is not a big enough category right. So we think of ourselves as a consumer app that's built on cryptogard reels. When you think about a consumer crypto app, you think about, okay, I have this demographic of crypto users. I need to be able to appease them and build for

them, but I think you really miss the mark because there's what maybe like 50 100,000 daily people that are actually using apps every day. And in order to capture even a meaningful part of that, it's just not big enough. So I think what ends up happening is like >> 50 to 100,000 crypto TAM. >> Yes. Okay. >> I think so. Maybe it's, you know, in the bull market, maybe it's like 5 to 10x that. But on any given day like you know today or tomorrow whenever like there's maybe 100,000 people that are actually using crypto you know DeFi apps or whatever other apps. So I think the mistake is you build for a consumer that is arguably the best consumer kind of type in the world where 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. And we've never been so close to a user as we have when we've been building in crypto. So, I think it's one of those things where like you build an overindex for an audience that is going to kind of build their they're going to work their way around whatever product you build and you need to be able to build for like the mass consumers which is the rest of the world. >> Yeah. What do you guys think about um what do you guys think about per general? Right. You guys I feel like DYDX I mean I guess you could say BitMX kicks off Pers and then DY it goes on chain with DYDX and then you have the whole like next cycle it's probably like you could say GMX um and now it's

obviously Hyperlid. What do you guys think? I mean, it feels like DYDX kind of I don't want to I don't know how you guys feel. You're post DYDX, but like I feel like they they fumbled like this huge opportunity, but yeah, very curious to get your guys' take. >> Yeah, I think timing is really important and we always knew. I feel like the first time I joined UIDX, I started to realize how amazing insurance perks were. I think S did too and our whole team did, but the products were too se technical. there was no way for consumers to access them, especially in the United States, and that's still true. Yeah. And I mean, some centralized exchanges are starting to get licenses now, but and the way people were trying to explain what it is to consumers, just wasn't working. So, there was no

adoption and there was just no interest. But I think as soon as the institutions had this aha moment where they're like, "This is a massive instrument. Let's adopt it." Then consumers started to build more trust and they're like, "What is this? It's time to get educated." And then people put more resource into actually educating people what they want or what it is. And I think I still it's kind of missing the mark. Like most people still don't know what PERPS are. But I do think over the next few years it'll become much more obvious what they are. And fundamentally like per sound like a very complicated thing, but under the hood they're actually very very simple.

>> Yeah. >> Interesting. Do you think DIYX could have turned into Hyperlid or do you think it was just wrong team, wrong time? Like >> of course I think I mean our team was incredible, right? And a lot of the builders at FOMO were XDYDX. I think we had the right team. I think the timing was a little off. Um unfortunately like obviously the FTX blow up and all this stuff happened, right? uh when DYDX was growing and then um due to like both regulatory but then also strategic product decision-m we had this DYDXV3 product that was actually functioning very well um with this off-chain order book and we had a lot of market makers working and then we built this DYDX chain which was very innovative right building everything on chain on application specific chain but I think that the infrastructure change hurt us a

little bit because market makers weren't able to quote as well and and that kind of led to this like downward spiral while Hyperlid is on the rise. Um but I mean that team is incredible. Um have a lot of respect for the leadership team there. They're all friends of ours and um it was definitely a heyday working there. >> Yeah, it's very like relevant actually conversation. I mean a lot of the lessons you guys learned at DYDX I feel like you can start to apply to FOMO like should we have an app chain or not? Right. You see Robin Hood chain obviously just launched. We'll get into I'm very curious to see how you guys think about Robin Hood competitor like you know how how you guys view that but um yeah I'm what do you think about this decision to launch like I mean not your

own chain but just app chains in general. >> I think they they make sense for specific use cases right like not everything is going to work on a general purpose chain or at least nothing that exists today at scale. Maybe there's a few like you know monad that are doing work to to get to scale but it just makes sense right like you want to build your own ecosystem. you want to be able to control, you know, how the chain itself works, you know, what's allowed, what's not, and you want to dictate the direction of what actually happens there. I think like, you know, take Ethereum for example, they're probably the biggest L1 today. Um, they've got a lot of great builders, but they don't really have a cohesive like ecosystem direction at the moment. A lot of that is they've been around for a while.

There's a lot of different takes on what leadership wants. I think for you to be truly focused on building one thing which is like I want to build you know an app chain that is specific to trading around Robin Hood or trading around Coinbase or assets that are coming from these platforms like it's got to be very very intentional and I think that's kind of you know along the lines of how I would build FOMO which is very intentional. Everything has to have a purpose and it can't just be like open up the floodgates and like let things happen. You kind of need to like seal the door in some way. >> Yeah 100%. >> Let's get into FOMO because I have a Go ahead. Yeah, I was going to say it actually goes back to your last question about how do you build like this

breakout consumer app where I think you have to optimize the best infrastructure but you still need distribution and I think like consumers don't really care if it's an app chain or general purpose. So if the app chain helps you build better infrastructure for execution etc but it's not like a distribution play. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Maybe the best place to start with FOMO is actually your guys' fundra, the fundraising history. Um because that will get into almost the story of what FOMO is. How do you guys talk about FOMO? So you guys just you you've done a couple successful fundraises. I think one of the reasons I want to have you guys on is um a couple traditional investors or like the you know uh this is the first like I think first crypto deal they've actually done with many of

your folks on your guys' cap table. So tell me about like how these fundraisers came together and like what is the story and how do you describe FOMO? >> Yeah, so our goal is for FOMO to be the largest trading app in the world and the social layer of all the finance and we think that a lot of people have tried seen building like a crypto consumer app as there's this new distribution channel of either crypto products or this new platform that we could capitalize with skumorphic products that worked on the internet that wasn't on chain. But our goal is to figure out what were the native use cases of the blockchain that make it uniquely beneficial for consumers. And that's one that it's global a global distribution channel.

From day one, 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 this consensus mechanism around it. So what you can do is you can take that have a wallet that you have fully custo full full custody of of and then just show some representation of that like you could be Jason or you could be blocks lover or you could be like uh New York 3835 whatever and then you could have this pseudonym but the transparency and this 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. So that's kind of the story we tell where this is now the biggest revolution in

financial products since trading was computerized for the first time in the 1970s where NASDAQ, 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. So when that happens, you could then build this social network on top of the movement of any asset in the world and it's global. And that's kind of how we sell the vision where there's this new platform that's blossoming and consumers don't have any access to it. But there's this huge benefits with discoverability of assets. And I think everyone has kind of realized and known that there's going to be a social consumer app or social finance consumer app that will take off for the past decade. And the reason it hasn't worked is because it's filled with confirmation

bias because you only show trades that you want to show um or there's like obfuscation of what's actually going on. But the blockchain starting with this community of like these crypto traders is the best way to start and then kind of grow this community where you could have people trading literally anything and expressing any thesis. >> Yeah, it's funny. The first time I saw FOMO, the the company that went in my that kind of popped up in my head was it Toro, right? I feel like E Toro, one of the things that made it Toro so big and so successful was copy trading like 15 years ago. >> So how do you guys think about um Okay, so here back back to the fundraiser. How did you guys So, it's uh benchmark uh index if I have that correctly like ventures >> and and USV so USB has done a lot of

crypto stuff you know Fred and their team is are great um but uh index and and uh benchmark don't usually do much crypto stuff definitely not benchmark how did these deals come together >> yeah I mean benchmark was an interesting story so fun fact actually Paul and I were late 15 minutes to our first meeting with Jathan so you know that's the only meeting that we're actually late to and it was like some technicality on Zoom or whatever Nice. But I think we went into that call, >> maybe there's a lesson there. Maybe that's like a flex and >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I mean, we went into that call thinking like, okay, you know, they they've got a great brand. Uh we admittedly didn't know much about them until that point.

>> And we did our research afterwards as well but >> cold intro. Yeah. Cold email or >> No, it was a warm intro from a friend, one of our angel investors like, "Hey, you guys should meet." You know, they don't really look at crypto, but it's worth just like discussing the landscape, right? So, we did that and within the first five minutes, Chaan, who led our deal there, he was just like, "I get it. like I understand and this is like something that we have not really looked at for a while. So they did do a few crypto deals with chain analysis and then something with telegram as well back in the day but I think they've kind of turned their eye away from this as many investors did and looked into the world of AI and I think now is a time where it's like okay

what's next like where is the technology just evolving at such a rapid pace and we had the conversation we had a few followon combos we met the rest of the partnership and I think they just understood um and that's the thing that we very much appreciate it's like hey like we built this product it might not really make sense today but it's going to make sense and this is a wedge that we're finding are going to build on so you know this is something that we'd love to have you on journey for you're interested and they were so you know we're very thankful for that and it's been great to just like build with Jason and the rest of the team there um and then index I actually don't know their crypto history all that much but that was just another deal that it's a

conversation that you know is worth having introduction from um Chathan which I actually think Julia tried to reach out to to Paul early on through uh through Henry at privy and we just weren't really interested in fundraising and even when we started taking the conversation that we weren't but it just became very clear to us as this is a partner that has done it before with you know the Robin Hoods the revolutes and really just understands how to scale consumer app. So it was really interesting to us on the value proposition side of you know what can they bring from individual experience and and just like collectively a firm. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. it there are um there are so many folks who have tried to do what you're doing right now that it's I think I'm it's a it's a tough uh it's a tough pitch to land I

feel like because there are so I mean I've probably had I mean I'm not like probably 30 pitches for like so crypto social trading what do you guys think it is in your guys' pitch that hit differently >> well I actually think you hit on something really important which is we wanted to work with non like crypto VCs because they've scaled the largest consumer reps in the controlled obviously benchmark scaled whatever Twitter Snapchat Uber etc. But I also think there's this understanding that the crypto companies only see these crypto deals and they get fatigue from seeing the same deal over and over. So then they put these blinders on. They're like, "Okay, no, I already said no to this deal." When the thing that works is the right team building the right thing at the right time, but you just like said no to a few deals. You're like,

"Okay, in my mind, I'm going to say no to every type of deal like this." Whereas the non-crypto VCs, they actually look at things like individually because they have such a wide array. They're doing data centers in space to like design software to uh FOMO where they can actually look at the team objectively. They can look at what we're building and actually understand it. Um so I think that was a big advantage. >> I think that happened to me too when you reached out. I was like, "Oh my god, another social >> social trading app." Yeah. So, did you guys always pitch it as a trading app or as a did you did it start niche like because there's two philosophies when you're like a founder building something? It's like own a niche and then expand or it's like let's go for the world first.

>> Yeah, it definitely started more niche. I think we understood where it could go and we had this really good feeling of how grand it could be, but we did start very niche. It was just an onchain trading app on Salana, right? And we saw Moonshot doing really well. They didn't have a social layer, but they simplified things really well. Um there's this app called Vector that was doing pretty well. >> The tensor guys. >> Yeah. Um and we respect that a lot, but we thought that they built an experience that was like really hard for a normal person to understand. It's kind of like build axim on your phone. >> I used I used it. Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah. So we were like we think that we can do this better and do the distribution better. And we have 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 this where you could actually like go in and see like where everyone bought in and the atomic units of trade and it's a much more intuitive experience. So with those building blocks we started very specific then expanded out of Salana and now to all assets. >> Yeah. When did when do you guys think the company had it what was like the breakout moment for the business? >> You want to talk about the offsite? >> Yeah, this was so we were on our first company offsite in um Cape Cod. There was like maybe eight of us. >> Good. It's a good off. >> Um we were just saying some >> um funny story actually is like the Airbnb was completely not ready. So we were like, you know, 24 48 hours delayed

and then we got to not have you know any time in the offsite because things start to kind of blow up in a good way. Um but we're sitting there and this is actually a hilarious story. So there's a token that's running at the time. I won't mention what it is, but you know we're seeing a lot of people buy this token through the Apple payflow that we have and there's just a lot of activity around the app. So we look at our stats and they pretty much 10x overnight. So, we're looking on Tik Tok, Instagram, YouTube, trying to figure out like what is going on here? Like, who is talking about FOMO? Turns out there's this one creator, Wealth Gathers, and he's just doing content after content after content. Uh, and then I look a little closer. It's actually my best friend's brother.

>> So, he didn't realize that I was running FOMO, and I didn't realize he was running. This was in July of 2025. >> Okay. >> So, he's like, "Oh, man. Like, I didn't know you're building FOMO. Like, this app is incredible. Like, I'm trying to get it to my audience." >> So, that was kind of the first growth moment where people wanted to buy a specific coin. They didn't really have a place to do it. So they found FOMO and it was very very easy to onboard. And that's kind of our aha moment of who who didn't have a place to do it because crypto people would have phantom or talk normies. >> Yeah. Pure normies users. >> That was the point in which we're like okay this app actually does work for not just a crypto crowd which we've already had empirical evidence like okay they

can use it. Can the normal user use this? And that was our moment of okay we need to like double triple down and really go hard for the people that can't access assets today. >> Yeah. And it was all you it was like three asset like bitcoin e soul or is all assets or it was primarily memecoins at the time. >> Yeah, long tail. >> Yeah, long tail. >> Yeah. And a lot of it is still longtail and we're starting to become long longer hold times and more to larger assets and 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 that those are really good onboarding moments for for new users. How did you guys build how did you guys build the platform and think about scale like

because there's these infrastructure decisions like should like here's one like should we have our own decks so do you guys what do you what do you do today like do you route through Jupiter do you do you build internally like how do you guys think about okay if you route through Jupiter today which I'm guessing you do maybe if you're if it was on Salana like one day will you get into that business how do you think about this >> yeah I mean today we route through a bunch of different aggregators so Jupiter okx cflon salana and then a bunch of others at zero on other chains. I think for us like there's there's like levels there, right? It's like the the front end, the technology, the underlying and then >> how much do you want to verticalize the stack basically?

>> Yeah. I mean at this point like we feel like the opportunity to distribute on the front end and as the like native mobile app or native web app is so big that it's not really worth us fragmenting focus and thinking about the layers in between. But I think that over time like there is a world where you want to start selling more of it, make it cheaper for users end to end. And I think that that's when like you know you can start to think about how do you start to bring some of these things in house. For now, we're very much focused on distribution. We only have, you know, six, 700,000 users. There's billions of people in the world that would actually be benefiting from this technology. So, you know, we have a lot to go before we can start thinking about these things.

>> Yeah. >> I think how we think about it is what how do we create the best experience for the user and right now it's like the front end needs a lot of work. So, we're working on that. But when certain partners are, I don't know, things 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 could build it a bespoke for us and give a better experience for the user. So I think as we think about verticalization, it's like 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 500 600 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 like kind of blew up on Twitter like you know these numbers can't be real, right? Because you mentioned there's 50 or 100,000 active people on Twitter. So or maybe on crypto Twitter trading every day. Where are these users coming from? >> Yeah, they're mostly coming through traditional channels. So, I would say maybe like 10% of our audience comes to crypto Twitter and crypto traders natively. And they obviously still drive a majority of the volume, right? It's probably like 30 40 50% at times. >> 10%. So, crypto Twitter drives 10% of the users, but maybe 40% of the volume, >> right? Because they're just, you know, they're higher transaction value. They have more um money on chain. They just like trade in and out a lot more

frequently versus like 90% of our audience. And and that's lifetime users, by the way. Like people were giving us crap. They were like, you know, you don't have 500,000 daily traders. Like, of course not. That's just not a realistic outcome in crypto today. Hopefully, it will be one day. >> But yeah, 600 or 700,000 who have signed up for the platform at any given point. Is that deposited money? >> No. So, that's lifetime users. And deposited is probably about 30% conversion. Yeah. So, there's still some work to be done there obviously, right? A lot of that is like how do we improve crypto on-ramps, how do we improve the onboarding experience, etc. Um but yeah like that that's the number today and we hope that this is actually like you know 1000 times bigger over the years and we'll still probably get controversy for it but it's something where like you

know it is a really small number like Robin Hood has 26 million funded accounts they probably have double or triple that of people who have actually signed up over time totally >> that's just the US like I think that when we think about crypto we try to like think about this echo chamber of people we're around every day like I only see 10 people in my group chat or 15 people on timeline but the world is you know 7 billion people like there's a lot of people that we can bring access How do you how do you market though? Because like this idea uh what I want to I keep coming back to this. It's like it's this is not a new idea, right? What you guys are doing is it's really not a new idea, but you guys have nailed the execution and really what nailing the

execution means. I know you guys probably do a million things in a day. Um but it's like it's a it's a user acquisition. Consumer trading is all a user acquisition game. So how have you nailed the us can you like can we go deep into user acquisition? Yeah, I mean we so we have this like maybe I don't know if it's unconventional, but we think the product is the only thing that matters. So build a good product and people will come and obviously you need to like figure out other channels to distribute that or else you know it's kind of like tree falls in the forest. Does anybody know? Um but we found great success in just like demoing what the app is like hey there's a token that you might like or there's this thing that you always wanted to buy you couldn't really do it

here's a platform that should do it really easily. You sign up you can see a social graph you can follow top traders get notified. So, we've really just been pitching and educating the product itself as opposed to like anything a little bit more gorilla like going to campuses or doing things that are, you know, things that don't scale or whatever it is. So, a lot of our effort is on how do we build the best product and show the people the product over and over and over again. And when the time comes, you'll 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 if they want to trade, this is where you do it. >> And there's definitely like the cost per acquisition. there's this curve where

some people will come immediately or some people you need to show them five times before they're actually ready or maybe just a time thing like they don't want to buy anything now they find out about FOMO they on board to see someone else and then next time when they're ready they'll come to FOMO so I think it's like this we think of it as a longer term game to really get people to the platform and 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 just know that we're building a platform for them that's easy to access and they could access anything >> yeah how many people are you guys signing up a Okay. Right now, >> well, we did what was it?

>> We probably did 12,000 >> 12,000 yesterday. >> 12,000 yesterday. >> But it's probably this signed up and then so 30% conversion. So, you got 4,000 funded. >> I think yesterday was a little bit higher. We saw probably about six or 7,000 deposits because I think like that's kind of tuning. It's like if your intention, right, you already know you want to buy and you come on, you do the thing versus sign up and it's like, okay, it's there for later. So, we're seeing a lot. >> So, like where are these 6,000 people coming from? Cuz like I'm on crypto Twitter, right? There's not 6,000 people on Crypto Twitter in a day signing up for a new platform. >> Yeah, we had product talk. >> Yeah. Well, there's there's 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's referrals. So, you'll tell your friend or like maybe your friend's a trader and he'll tell his friends and there's a lot of word of mouth there. And then there's some UGC on TikTok, people making videos about this platform or what's really cool is this social graph is this feedback mechanism that exists in the app. So say talked about product first growth just building the best product but there's also a lot of growth mechanisms built into the product like the share cards or the fumble cards and these things. So like for example this guy poor goat got air dropped 30k of this Anthemcoin now it's worth $1.2 million right so like people are posting wow this guy made $1.2 million so you don't even need to come to the platform to trade but you're just curious so you come to the platform to see it for

yourself now you're on the platform and then when it's time that you want to trade you'll come and trade. >> Got it. Yeah. >> Oh, so the Anomcoin is actually driving a lot of users. Yeah. >> So you So when these Okay. So when the long >> the long like >> some uh virality on a longtail coin is one of the best user acquisition things for you guys. And it's it's even better when it's across multiple chains. Like for example, there was a couple of B&B coins that were doing really well as a byproduct of Anzipcoin. >> So now you're at this place where like I can trade both these chains in under 3 seconds in one application as opposed to urging having two wallets. So I think that's when we see the most growth actually is. Embarrassingly, I haven't actually used the app, which I I'll have

to use it after this. I got to get the I got to get a code or something. Um, but uh the experience, and sorry, I really should have used it before this, but does the experience feel more like a MetaMask and a Phantom or more like a Robin Hood or more like a a totally different trading experience? What's it what's it feel like? >> Yeah, I think >> and what do you want it to do? you merge like a Robin Hood and a Twitter in a way, but it's also like Instagram UX. Like we try to make it very simple and graphical so it's easy for the user. I think it kind of feels like if you mixed honestly Instagram and Robin Hood, I think that might actually be the best uh comparison. I would love to hear when you use it, like what your take is, but

then the information from something like a Twitter, right? >> Um and the goal is to >> really build our own social graph here. I think that there's so much lacking on FOMO. We kind of tabled everything to build our web app and then our pers product back to back and we haven't really done much on the social side and 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 actually build the tooling to make this experience better. Like for example, the feed, huge opportunity, really underutilized because it's just this timelinear feed that's not that helpful right now. But you could see like the best companies in the world like a Tik Tok, a Twitter, and Instagram built these ranked feeds, right, that are really personalized to you, stuff that you want to see. So

right now, like Jason joins FOMO. There will probably be a notification on the feed, but it will very quickly get kind of buried in the feed, so people won't see it. We want to make it so everyone sees that, right? because you might be a good trader to follow you or you have this thesis that oh Meta is going to open their comp or their data center business uh to other customers. So these people have these thesis and today we see Meta stock up and all the cloud provider stocks down and you could have these thesis and this discovery mechanism where you could socially discover new assets. >> Um >> what do I benefit as a as a creator if I come onto the platform? Yeah. I think one joining any new platform that's going to hopefully be in the hands of hundreds of millions of people with a

huge asymmetric upside like whether it's a Logan Paul on >> joining a new social network. >> Exactly. Okay. Okay. >> Exactly. And I mean there are people with on FOMO with over 100,000 followers already. I think multiple people and these people then built had only a few thousand followers on X and now have tens of thousands of followers on X. So you're building a personal brand there. And can you post about Sorry, I keep interrupting you, but can can you post like just like a tweet or >> So you can post a thesis. So thesis I think where a lot of social gets lost in trading applications is you could just like write and there's very much a lot of noise and no signal. So on FOMO you tie a thesis to a trade. So you basically have a trade like a Bitcoin trade and I think Bitcoin's going to go

up because the market's booming or I think I shorting Bitcoin because of quantum computing, right? And then you can go in there and people could like your thesis. People could follow you, see your new thesis. And 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. And one thing that's crazy is we don't even have a notification center yet. So someone likes your post, follows you, tags you into something. You don't even have the feedback loop yet, which is super important for a social product. >> It just clicked to me why USB did this investment. They uh they invested in a company back in 2016 called Numera.

>> Yeah. And um I I remember their blog post when they made that investment. It said something along the lines of like how can we apply the network effects that come from social media networks to capital allocation. And um so anyway, so they invested in this thing called Numera, which was like a >> hedge funds managed by anonymous people and you could buy into the hedge funds. And anyways, 10 years later, it seems like maybe they got the I think actually Numera did well for them. But um okay, back to the app. Can I if I post a trade and people can people follow me into the trade? Yes. And >> will I make money by them following me into the trade or no? That's what ref link is for.

>> On the first point, not automatically. And we think this is really important because let's say you had like a million dollars following your trade automatically. You're going to trade differently. Like you're not going to buy certain coins because you don't want to have the obligation of people following you. So we build all of the tools for you to instantly find out when other people are making moves, the notifications, the feed, etc. But we don't want any automatic copy trading. We just think it's a like a downward slope and you can manipulate it, right? Because you could buy an unlquid token and then dump on your followers. There is the social consensus mechanism and reputation tied to it, but it's just not something we want to play with >> is the way that most of the creators make money from the ref links. Like if

you remember how like buy bit like this is how by bit grew, right? Or was ref links. Ref links were really how by bit became sec third then second biggest exchange right? >> Yeah. There are people making tons of money on refs today. We don't have a future where if you if I trade off your information like let's say I buy from your half 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 that doesn't exist today. Yeah, I think you hit on an important point which is like for every social graph that exists as you get bigger the experience is better for you, right? You monetize, you have more influence, you can do these things. So the thing we're thinking about there is like maybe we

create a friend tech, you know, style gated key room where or chat room where you need to subscribe or you need to, you know, do something to be able to get access to their 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 and not a profit basis. Like there's all these things we're thinking about and that's kind of what like I guess social V2 or V3 would look like. Yeah. >> Um, 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 don't we go we go

through VEX entirely. And we've had a lot of conversations. You know, we come from institutional background. So everybody >> uh Doge Bank and Nydx where I spent a lot of time just on boarding a lot of crypto market makers um and market makers into crypto as well. But it just didn't feel like something that made sense at the moment. Um, for us, like you know, one of the things we do, which I think is very rare, is we actually work with all of our aggregators and routers so that they don't take positive slippage, which is a concept that like people probably haven't heard of before, but it's it's a concept where like you go buy the salon, you go buy salon $80, it goes up to 81, but because we showed you 80, they can take a dollar or whatever the difference is and pocket

that. We pay them a monthly amount to say you're not taking that amount because if the price moves in favor of their in of their execution, they should get the full amount. So, it's something that every single trading app pretty much turns a blind eye to because it's in their best interest to either take a profit share or to let the other aggregator earn more money and they don't have to pay a commercial amount. For us, we will actively lose money to make sure the user gets the absolute best execution. And that's really important for us because we need to be a trusted platform. People feel like they're always being done right. >> What are other product tradeoffs that you guys have made like that one >> that benefit the user and not us?

anything or internal like it sounds like Paul you sit on more of like the normie user say you're more on the trader side so like there's there's trade-offs there as I think about building an app there's trade-offs between that would be like a trade-off between the product team would want this >> the finance team would want this right so there's >> yeah really I mean really any trade-off if any others come to mind >> there's a number of things like one is USCC trading so right now you know you trade from a cash balance you don't trade from Salana into coins or BNB or ETH and that's a decision that I think is is very rare like nobody has said that before, right? Everybody trades out as a native gas token, but with how gas sponsorship works today, you can do that very easily where you shouldn't have to

face, you know, market beta to whatever the underlying gas token is. So, that's something we do. There's obviously some trade-offs because crypto native traders are like, I think in soul or I think in ETH or I think in BNB, but it's something to go to cash. >> You have to go to cash, >> USDC or cash. >> USDC is cash in our app is okay. >> Yeah. So, that's one. Another is like we don't let you pay gas fees. So, we pay that on your behalf. We pay uh priority fees and it's all just based on an algorithm that we use. We don't let you set slippage. We don't let you set all these things that you know will be very foreign to a normal user, but crypto user might want. There's trade-offs, right? Like it's not always the best experience, but we need to figure out

what is the right balance. And maybe for a more advanced tool like a web application, we can actually let you do these things on your own if you're a crypto trader. >> Interesting. >> Yeah. Another one's import 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 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. So you're a normie and you're like, "Okay, this guy doesn't have his wallet exported or imported to FOMO from this protrading tool. We're both using FOMO." And I think that was really, really important to have people come participate as part of the social graph if they want to use our trading product.

And 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 now the benefits is instrumental, right, to be where we are uh with having everyone trading natively on FOMO. >> Interesting. >> Business model is fees based. >> Yeah. >> Uh 50 bips. >> It's 50 bips on >> 50 bips on Longtail Spot on majors like Bitcoin, ETH, etc. Salana. It's only five basis points. So it's basically free to trade because we sponsor gas as well right? >> And the goal there is, it was so funny.

I was like just demoing it recently and I was on Robin Hood and I tried I was like demoing like buying some Bitcoin and the fees there is 85 bips each way which is insane. So like you're buying a Bitcoin and you're losing like I don't know like 3 to 5K and it was funny that on FOMO you could basically do it for free. So I think it's having this non-custodial experience and giving this experience to users where they could just trade majors for free if they want but then participate in a longtail if they want to as well is really important to us. >> So the majors are five bips. Yeah. spot is 50 bips.

>> 50 bips. >> Herps five bips. >> Herbs is five bips on top of all the >> third party protocol fees and stuff. >> Yes. I Yeah. >> And that goes that the user pays those as well. >> Yes. >> Okay. Yes. Okay. Um and then you guys absorb the gas fees. >> Yep. >> Okay. Um >> token rent and all the other infrastructure fees. >> All of that. Okay. >> Um what's bigger, spot or pers? >> Sorry. What's bigger? Spot is bigger is a probably at least an order of magnitude. Yeah. And users multiple orders like >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Per just launched two weeks ago and Perps actually >> Per is only two weeks old.

>> It's two weeks old and it's very bare bones. There's no social features yet. So, we just shipped on the orders like yesterday. Uh we don't have like you don't get notified if I buy something. There's no feed. There's no like interactive experience that kind of ties together. So, these are all being shipped this week and I think it'll create a bigger opportunity for us to just get more and more people involved and obviously like that's an unexplored space for most of retail. So really interested to see how like non US users are able to like tap into this from you know broader scale not just crypto native. >> Yeah 100%. Um the most addicting tool I've app I've used in the last year was a very consumerfriendly per tool and I I don't trade that much >> but it's extremely addicting.

>> Interesting. Do you mind sharing what it was? >> Yeah it was um >> or what you liked about >> I gota Yeah, I'll I'll find the I'll find the app name because they uh they they ended up shutting down and returning investor capital but it was on top of Hyperlid. So I do you guys use Hyperlid? We're doing okay. >> What's that experience been like? >> Very easy actually. >> Yeah. I mean, we integrated the entire um builder code experience in two and a half weeks. >> Nice. >> So, very very frictionless. You know, their team is very easy to work with and yeah, it's it's honest been great. Like I think that they understand how to write documentation. They understand, you know, what people need from both market making and building perspectives.

So, we're able to integrate pretty easily and and that's been a really good experience. >> Nice. Yeah. >> How there's the uh there's like the leaderboard of, you know, hyperlquid revenue for the builder codes. Yeah. was like I think Phantom was near the top. >> Yeah, Phantom's one. >> One. Where are you guys? >> We've gone up to two. So, we're anywhere between like six and two on a given day. >> That's great. Do you think pers will one day overtake spot platform? >> I think so. >> Yeah, >> I think so. I think as we add more spot assets, I think it'll balance out. I think it'll probably look like very spot-heavy, probably heavy, and then as more assets come on chain, maybe it'll balance out again to be more even spawn and per. Yeah. You think you'll end up keeping the the fee? Like will you

monetize like this in five years? Right? Because for a normal user, they see Robin Hood free 50 bips, right? >> Even though that's not actually how it works, obviously under the hood, but most people don't get that. >> Well, most of the assets that are available on FOMO for 50 bips aren't even available on Robin Hood, right? Like Robin Hood has maybe 100 to 150 crypto assets where there's tens of millions of assets available on FOMO. Most of the assets that are available on Robin Hood are available on FOMO for five bips. And we don't do payment for order flow. And Robin Hood Robin Hood stocks does payment for order flow. This it's free. But Robin Hood crypto is 85 bips each transaction. So it's actually more than us.

>> Yeah. Okay. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I wonder I mean my thesis for where all this goes is all of this trading will go on chain. Like I think all of all of it will even the centralized exchanges like I think where like use Coinbase as an example like Coinbase will eventually either they'll build their own DEX or they'll buy a DEX or they'll part you know take 49% stake in a DEX based on regulations. I I don't know what it looks like but they will end up routing all trades on chain I think. Um I think Binance will do the same thing. I think OKX will do the same thing. Does that >> it kind of like and I think Robin Hood will end up doing the same thing. How do you guys think about competing in a world like that? Right? Because Coinbase

has a 100 million users. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I mean, I think we are, this might be naive, say a best position to be honest. I think we're like very young and we're humble about that. Like I know like even where we are is pretty much nowhere, but we are are happy where on the path we're on, but I think no one has really built a native first onchain trading experience that consumers can access. And I think a lot of these experiences that will leverage onchain assets will not be native non-custodial onchain experiences. So we're like one of the first applications that allowed you to have this non-custodial onchain experience, but it kind of feel like a regular experience above the hood. And that's exactly what this should look

like. Crypto rails should dissolve into the background of the experience. And crypto will not only be the underpinning of financial rails for trading, I think all value transfer like think about swift, right? like banks have to be part of this system. The Swift system is when you debit one account, it notifies another bank that you have that debit. So then it can readjust your account and it doesn't even do the value transfer. It's like you're just moving cash and then debiting a computer and it takes three days to update. Crypto, it's like 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. And I really agree with you, it'll happen next 5 to 10 years. I mean Robin Hood believes this as well, right? they just had this this thesis and they're making

a lot of moves there and I think it's really great like they're going to build an amazing tokenized equity product and we hope to build on them and other tokenized equity products as well. Um and hopefully some of these bigger players can be the key infrastructure that can help us move towards there and we can hopefully build an amazing onchain experience for consumers. >> Yeah, I think the the other thing there like is we we tend to believe like the market's very efficient, right? So in over some time horizon like the best product will win and in in our view like you know everybody can come on chain everybody can do the same things and if tomorrow all these exchanges offer these assets you know through their native experience like 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 that's going to be the case for per stocks for prediction markets for even yield strategies so where do you want to be you want to be at the place where you're at the forefront of discovery of information of price discovery etc. So I think that 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 and as a new user, you want to be where the best people are, not where you know you're >> focus social network. Yeah. Interesting. On the Sorry, I'm held up on the on the business model for a second. On the fees side of things, >> fees are the um >> it's like the most cyclical business

model in a business like yours. like when like Coinbase went public, they're like, "Oh crap, like let's get out of the fees business and let's, you know, start doing all these other things." So, do you have to give like um because you're giving up a like net net interest margin and lending and staking and um you know, payment for order flow. People don't like it, but like it, you know, it's a good good business model. Um yeah, how do you think about I mean five like f like fast forward several years, huge business, you guys go public, you must add more things now. I think there are ways and products that you could build that will be good revenue models during down markets that are actually beneficial to the users but not extract it for them. For example, if we build a FOMO gold where we can maybe give you

where we take a certain fee every month but then we make sure that your priority fees are 99%. So like no matter what you're getting execution or we give you like access to maybe these group chat features or or like other features on top of that that are pro features then you got to create this uh benefit for the user but then also this more fortified revenue stream. So that's how we kind of think about it over time. And yeah, I mean I mean listen, like right now we have USDC. Like there's a lot of people pitching us building our own stable coin and sharing yields, right? So there's a lot of other ways that we can gain revenue during kind of market downturns, but this is actually the main reason we fundra. I think well there's two. One is the the great partners that

we've kind of 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 B business is cyclical. Like you go look at Robin Hood and Coinbase stock. So fortifying our balance sheet from these most recent fundraising runs was specifically so if the market does turn, we have money to kind of build through that and and succeed on the other side. >> Yeah. I mean the good thing about this is you're raising at the I mean who I'm not calling bottoms here but like pretty bad crypto days right now. So >> um the one of the trends on centralized exchanges is um partnering with lend borrow folks like um you know Morpho just did this with Robin Hood. Morpho has also got their vault on Coinbase, right? Veta and like Kraken. Have you

guys thought about what that would look like for you guys? What's the FOMO version of that? >> Yeah, we've we talked with all those guys and it's interesting to us, right? Like I think that that is an area where we think it fits into the FOMO vision of value transfer of value creation of value, you know, whatever else. So, something we're directly interested in um 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 stable coins. We want to offer you native yield on, you know, your USC your your Ethereum or Salon or your Bitcoin or whatever else. So, it's interesting to us and hopefully we have that in the near future. >> Yeah. Yeah. How do you guys make product um how do you prioritize products and what to go build, right? You could go

build this yield thing. You could go build FOMO gold. You could go build your own stable coin. How do these like maybe on a like is there a Monday meeting? Is this come from like is one of you guys like technically chief product officer? Like how does this actually happen internally? >> Yeah, we have small pods or >> No, we have a Monday meeting. So, yeah. us and pashan every Monday morning we're sitting down and looking at okay what is going on the market what are we getting you know feedback from users for what do we need to build that you know other people can't see just yet we try to go to where the puck is skating too and I think you know one of our big misses was we weren't on B&B chain early enough but you know we're on base chain early

enough so we need to always be evaluating like you know where did we go wrong have retros on what went right what went wrong what can we do for you know the better for the future and it's honestly a feel thing like we we've had a pretty good pulse in the market so far not to say it's always going to you. We try to use data. We try to use empirical evidence. We try to just understand user feedback and then you know build the right things and what we hope is the right cadence while not losing focus on you know what the bigger picture is. >> Yeah. >> There's also some marginal difference about some of the small things but the larger products we build are like more obvious. It's not like a marginal like we both are where all three of us were like okay we have to do this you know

like on the social product features recently like okay we haven't touched this for a while like this is really important let's do it. Per SpaceX is launching we have to do it. So um web it's like we need to build this experience as a foundation for our spot and and per trading business going forward right we need to have this other platform and that'll be an important foundation that we could build upon so I think we're doing it in the correct order for in our eyes but yeah there will be probably harder decisions in the future and I'm confident that like us three can come to it through consensus >> um how how would you make a decision like the stable coin one >> yeah I think we would look at all the different partners like what the yield opportunity is, what like kind of the architecture

of it, like where where it's custodied, how it's controlled. Um, pairs are really important because you're doing all these liquidity pools, right? So, we would need I guess you really only need a good pair of like your native stable coin in Solana because then you could do that route into any coin. But thinking about like yeah, what the liquidity of the pairs are, like who the partner is, do we enjoy working with the team, are they uh technically like uh do they technically work well with our team, etc. Yeah. Do do you think you guys want your own stable coin or is it easier to just >> I mean USDC has the liquidity, right? So >> like it it feels easier to be like, "Hey, Circle guys, like we're talking to Agora and M0 and Bridge and all these guys, but like I'd really rather stick

with USDC. Can you just give us 90% or we're gonna we're we're you're almost going to force us to leave." >> Yeah. I mean, some businesses are like are much more staunch than you think they would. like I feel like they're not as willing to I guess change their business model as you think they should to work with partners. Um so 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. >> Yeah. Interesting. Um how big is the team? >> Like 20 now. 17. Yeah. Like under 20 for sure. We we we've got a few hires that are joining us soon and a few things that are in the works. So you know roughly like 18 people.

>> Nice. >> Yeah. Do you um how much money? How much did you guys just raise? >> 75 million. >> 75. >> 75. What what will you do with that money? >> Like you I'm sure there's the de there's the slide in the deck, right? And there's the you know conversation with the investor. They're like, "All right, Paul, like 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 aqua hire. There's a team here we want to, you know, bring in." And they're like, "Great. That gets you to like 15 million. What about the other 60?" How how do how do you >> Yes. So, I mean, we have more money than we ever raised. I think we've been profitable. funds. I think a lot of it is opportunistic for us in the sense

like these are the right partners building the right business and bring 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 but I do think that there are a lot of things like we are going to ramp up our money our spend on growth. We're not going to just do it all at once but we will do it intentionally but there's a lot of fruit that is like a little bit higher on the tree costs a little bit more but is like a huge return right? um >> like what like a >> so like even thinking just through CAC on UGC like you can basically get a user for a certain dollar amount but maybe there's another user that costs more to acquire um but still like their lifetime

value is higher than their CAC right so as long as like the lifetime value is higher in the CAC then you're willing to spend even more to acquire them and we haven't moved up on that curve at all yet um like we talked about vertical integration there are certain things that we are thinking about bringing in house I don't think it's immediate But um hiring on that front and working more closely with other teams is something that's going to be somewhat capital intensive. >> Yeah. >> Um those are the main things. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. 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 um around around CAC and acquiring users, which is that you you guys actually have no

competition, very little competition when you're trying to acquire users in a bare market because no one else is spending money. But in a but it's the user intent is very low. So user intent is low, but no no competition. In a bull market, user intent is extremely high, but there's extremely high competition as well. Have you how do you think about uh capital allocation in that environment? >> Yeah, I think it has to scale, right? Like like 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? Like you see that experience at Coinbase, at Robin Hood, at pretty much any trading app that's ever existed. When people are not interested, they are not interested, right?

>> So, I think that there's kind of two frameworks there. One is you either continue to spend the same amount of money in Baron Bull and you're kind of buying goodwill in the bear where you're making these impressions. is maybe they see you for the third or fourth time and then the fifth time in the bull they're a lot more excited about where you are. That's one way to do it. The other is like you completely stop spending in the bare market and then in the bull market, you know, you wrap it up significantly. Truthfully, like we've never seen a bull market, so it's hard to tell what that actually looks like for us. Um, but I think if you just think about like supply and demand, right? Even in a bull market, there's going to be a lot more content creators, a lot more people that

are interested in kind of onboarding people, whether it's through their own channels or partnerships or whatever. So, I think 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, you know, going to be the driver of what people want to, you know, use and experience on a daily basis. >> Yeah. >> What's the um what's the revenue share? Like how do you convince a creator to come on and like how how much money would you give the big people? Like let's say Anom's like I'm looking for an exclusive deal like will you give him five million bucks? Give him a million bucks. What's been really cool and not not to dodge a question but like what's really cool is like people would pay like a TJR so much money to be on their

platform but he naturally came to FOMO because there's this and we didn't pay him anything right because he has this coin he wants to talk about it he wants to share thesis and he wants to see the public to see him holding it there's no other platform to do that besides FOMO like people could go to like an EOA wallet and they could type in his like alpha numeric string but or I can come to FOMO just type TJR see his trade in real time in this beautiful sheet with the thesis etc. So I think that there are very few products that one like actual users and audiences want to convert like these guys they one want to make money monthly but they also want to like actually talk about products that their their audiences want to use because their personal brand is everything they have so they don't want

to tarnish it. So, I think like we are at a nice position where we're working with creators that creators just want to come to our platform organically and then we want to give them all the support through our like in-house media platform like we're talking about and all these other things to help them grow their businesses, right? We knew all these token teams. We have like this UGC arm. We could help them kind of help build their personal brand. So, it's a win-win there. >> Yeah. Yeah. And and so what so what would you pay? >> I think we're we're very intentional. We're trying to be very like methodical about like what is the cost per impression, what is the CAC, what is LTV, etc. Yeah.

>> I think like we truthfully like we just don't pay traders to come on to the platform like we would we sponsor content. So we work with about eight or nine 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 that >> like you would you would sponsor sorry cut you off sponsor Thread Guys streams but you wouldn't pay thread guy to come on the platform. >> Yeah. So that's something that everybody does in crypto even outside of crypto. that we've been very public about it whether you believe it or not. You know, we don't pay people to trade on the platform or even really talk about it. Um, we sponsor content because we think that that's something that's really interesting. We have this vision of own media and it's something that's very

important for the education space, right? So, would we pay him some a million dollars? Probably not. Would we pay him a fraction of that? Maybe. But it's hard to tell, right? Like our growth budget right now is is not that big transparently. Like it's under >> probably what most people expect by by quite a lot. >> We rent those dollars. >> Yeah. I mean Ren Ren is the uh he's the analytical tool, right? So he's like, you know, this isn't going to work. You know, I don't think that this makes sense. >> He says no a lot. >> That's what you want from Yeah. Most marketers want to say yes to that. >> Yeah, >> that's good. >> Yeah. >> Um, who's a bigger competitor, Robin Hood or Twitter?

>> It's a good question. I'd say Robin Hood because we're trading at first. Um, and like X has X or Twitter has like a a massive business around like media that isn't just financial media, right? And over time, like hopefully FOMO becomes this financial media platform. Um, but X has so much other content. >> So, probably. Yeah. >> Do you think X will work as a trading platform? >> It's interesting because I think we've talked about this pretty early on. It's like why why don't you just let people trade through X, right? And I think you run into a whole like slew of issues which is where do you route to? Can you do you know onchain wallets? Do you have to use you know centralized partnerships

with you know brokerages like etor or Robin Hood or interactive brokers or whoever. And I think they've gone that um latter route which is like they've started to partner with a lot of these like centralized entities. It's hard to scale that right because if you're anonymous person on Twitter like you trade onchain are you really going to give that up to come give all your information to this platform share it with you know whoever else connect your bank account do all these things that it's a little bit more uh friction. Um and I think that that proves on our benefit because the best traders will stay on chain. So we have the benefit of you know attracting the best talent and having trouble trickle down effects of that.

>> Yeah. Yeah. How do you um how do you so copy trading um has this like dark pattern that tends to develop and Paul you mentioned this briefly but maybe we can go a little deeper where you know leader the best traders get a ton of followers and then either um their their entries basically get frontr run or even worse they and it becomes a vehicle to dump on you know to dump on their follow or like they use their followers as exit liquidity. How do you is that preventable or is that just the nature of like how social and trading kind of come together?

>> Well, I actually think social if it's fully transparent is actually a mechanism that works against this, right? So, I think it's actually the transparency helps prevent this >> because the reputation's on the line. >> Well, there's a reputation and there's stats like average hold time, all these things. So, on FOMO, you go someone's profile, you see their average hold time on a coin. So, you understand if they're like someone who's just going to like dump on you in minutes right after or if it's someone who actually holds for the long term. But then also social reputation is huge, right? Um, and I think that that's actually really really important because okay, like 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? And this is why we don't do the automatic copy trading because I mean the social reputation still fights against that. But it just like maybe gives you more of an excuse where you're like, "Oh, I just want to buy this coin and sell it." Like if you see buy something and a bunch of people buy behind you, I think like it's really important that people could see your average whole time and these things in the holder section on the app and then you can keep your social credibility over time. >> Yeah. Interesting. >> Remember when Fentac basically auto added everybody? >> Yeah. I don't know if you guys followed that closely, but like they they auto added people to the plat or no BitCloud.

>> Bitcloud. If you I don't know if you remember BitCloud. They like auto added people and you'd go and you'd claim your money. Um, so like I was on the platform. I never signed up, but like they added me to the platform. >> You could do something like this. I'm thinking about like Arthur Hayes is like on Twitter all the time right now about his trades and then dumping and stuff like that. So you could add Arthur and be like, "Hey, you've got like 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 rep because this is what coins do. Like a launchpad. It's like claim the creator fees and you have people in your DMs claim the fees, claim the fees.

And I think this is like you saw the guy the the open claw guy, right? He's on the Lex Freeman podcast like roasting crypto because everyone's in his DMs trying to and his whole Twitter just flooded by claiming these fees. So we thought about it and there could be a Google mechanism where you could track someone's wallet. Maybe they get some of the fees etc. But we're starting to see a lot of these top traders already move to FOMO organically and that's working really well. And like we are in it for the long term like say 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. And this is with our content partners, too. Like this is why we never

pay anyone to trade. We know that's that's that's not sustainable. Like we pay you to trade. You come on the platform. We want to build a platform that's so good that you don't want to trade anywhere else. And that's the biggest traders. That's with our content creators. That's with anyone else. Um >> so yeah, I think that's kind of why we would avoid a mechanism like that. >> Yeah. Interesting. Do >> you guys work with Do you guys pull in data from like like the wallet tracking. Is it like Arkham and Nansson or do you try to build everything in house? >> It's all native for all of your data. >> Yep.

>> Interesting. >> That's cool. That's cool. Um can you tell me about the media arm? >> Paul, I think you tweeted something about like we want to build this huge army of you know creators and uh you know 30 40 people right now. It's I think say you said you have nine right now. >> Nine on X. Yeah. >> Okay. Um, I think Paulie said you you want to build one of the largest media arms of any tech company. >> Yeah. >> Very similar to I saw that and was like nodding my head and agreeing with it when I read it. Like that's that's been the Blockworks thesis for a while is if you own this huge owned audience, you can you can then drive the the audience and the customers into your product, right? And you can actually have either extremely low customer acquisition cost

or basically no customer acquisition cost. How do you can you Yeah. develop that thesis a little more for me? >> Yeah. So I think media is in two forms. One is like internal to the app media because we're obviously a social media platform where the media is the trades and the thesis, >> right? But because it's not like Tik Tok where you're showing your face and all of these things and it's more trading related and the trade is the feature thing which makes it more like X which is actually like a idea discovery platform not like an influencer kind of platform like an Instagram but I do think you want these people to be able to build their their personal brands right so when we can create a a media arm external to the business whether it's these like 7 to9 podcasts or or media relationships whether it's even

our UGC armory which is also like a media business, right? It's distributing wide media uh that looks very organic to like a large group of people on Tik Tok, Instagram, etc. We can then leverage that for our partners and for our creators on our platform. And we even talked about this like how can you for businesses and leverage your media arm to help them? Well, our idea is like instead of businesses, that's the creators on the product because we talk about this a lot, but what kind of killed clubhouse was they had this organic ecosystem. you saw Mark Andre talking on a Sunday about random things and like you're like that's amazing and then they brought all these celebrities in and it kind of killed the platform because all of the organic creators for that platform left because they got

consumed by these celebrities and it's really important for us to think through what are the FOMO creators like the Remis or the Iceman or now like the poor goat or like these guys that like make these big trades start to gain a big following on the platform and then how can we use our media arm to help kind of grow their personal brands off platform as H poor goat. I'm looking this guy up. >> Number two trader on FOMO >> on the 24h hour. Yeah, >> that's very cool. Frank DGOs. >> Yeah, Frank as well. >> Nice. Change at change at logjam.

>> Yeah, >> celebrities. >> Yeah, exactly. >> That's cool. That's cool. Um, you guys, did you guys launch with Apple Pay? >> We didn't know. >> No. How big was Apple Pay? >> Okay. >> That was our big 10x growth event. Was it adding Apple Pay? >> Yeah. >> Interesting. >> Not a like maybe a couple weeks after. >> Yeah. >> So, why doesn't everyone do Apple Pay? >> I think there's like >> Well, they should, right? >> Yeah. Yeah. Like there's um I think that's still the biggest bottleneck in crypto by far. It's like how do you get money onto the platform without giving up your life, right? Like there's now progressive KYC, so you can do some amount of money without, you know, anything but an email and then you scale up over time. There's different providers and different geos. But yeah, like onboarding is one of those things

where I don't think people pay enough attention to and that's primarily as a byproduct of, you know, most crypto users are 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, you know, Indonesia or New York or, you know, Italy or wherever you should be able to access, you know, the crypto blockchain in its purest form. So Apple Pay is something we've done, you know, a lot of effort on. There's, you know, partners we work with there. There's stuff we're doing on like the bank a side, the debit, you know, all of the kind of different mechanisms that exist globally. So, yeah, like it's it's a thing that's done well for us and we would encourage consumer apps to try to do more onboarding mechanism generally.

>> Yeah. Yeah. If the US regulations got even friendlier, would you guys do you guys have non-custodial wallet which like helps from a regulatory perspective obviously? Would you guys do custodial if the regulations were a little more friendly? I think no oil is just the better architecture here. Like >> we're not dogmatic about these things. We just want to build the best product experience for our user. >> I do think a lot of these normie users actually would be fine with KYC etc. I think even on top of it, it's like one like the on-ramp to just get funds on the platform into crypto is hard, but even the success rates even if you do KYC are really low. Um and that's just like kind of a bummer because people just want to fairly get money on these platforms. I will say that we have seen

a lot of improvement there and I do think in the next few years this will be a solved issue in a commodity and that'll be great for us because that's not a competitive advantage. We just want people to be able to trade on FOMO but yeah on your question I think 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 no non-custodial experience is the best one. >> Yeah. Nice. Uh this is maybe a boring qu uh question for listeners but just personal curiosity in in my shoes is um what are the what are the um infrastructure providers that you guys use to run the company like you have you know have hyperlquid for per y >> like what's the embedded wallet is it privy yes

>> privy like what what are the other infrastructure providers >> so there's the routing which is jupiter uh dflow and okx on salana zerox and maybe a couple others on EVM uh we work with a solver um we work the relay on the crosschain swaps. Um, a bunch of people on the on-ramp, Coinbase, Stripe. Um, and then Cross Mint on the Apple Pay stuff. Any any I'm missing? >> Yeah. And then like Defined or or Codeex for data, Mobila for data. Um, >> and then a couple of others like we kind of try to, you know, work with as many people as possible across all domains.

But >> I think like a lot of this technology didn't exist even like >> that's what I'm saying. like what you guys had to dox like probably probably not a single one of those actually existed when you guys were a dodx >> most of them not in at least in the current form >> not in the current yeah exactly >> that's great um tokenized equities do you guys have it on the platform >> we have a few um I mean and by we have a few I just mean like anything that's onchain you can trade right like we're a platform that lets you tap into any asset that's available liquidity pool so you know you can trade these things today um I think that there's something we're really interested in and want to get better educated on how do we provide this experience rest the user there's a

lot of edges >> pretty crappy user experience today like 78 versions of SpaceX >> right and there's a lot of like edge cases right it's like a company gives dividends how do you actually go fix that token price you need to go do manual work on the front end to reconcile these things and I think that there will be a more uniform standard to like how you deal with these like dividends or reinvestments or whatever it is but yeah for now we're trying to get educated and trying to offer the best >> so basically you guys offer any onchain asset yes >> okay so as equities move on chain you'll be able to offer equities as prediction markets move on chain 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. Yeah. >> Would you guys build internally or is that like a partner with the Cali? >> I think it's similar model to how we how we look at today where we'll work with a partner. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Nice. >> Um I guess couch or poly market. Um what do we miss guys? >> Covered a lot. biggest priority for FOMO in 2026. >> That's a long year. Um there's still five months left. I think uh I think the the like one of the things we want to kind of nail home is like we're not trying to be this like everything app, right? We want to be an app where our slogan is never miss out again. So anything you can think of wanting hopefully we're a step ahead of you.

Yield, prediction markets, per stocks, tokenized equities, whatever it is, like we want to be the place where you think about your interest in doing something and we already have it. So that's the way we think about everything. And that's being very intentional. That doesn't mean, you know, we had a 401k and a credit card and this and that and the third. You want to be very specific about what we do 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 on chain? Like let's say so you want to go to FOMO for anything that you that you want to buy. Yeah. >> Um like I want to buy some copper. >> I want to buy like 3x levered copper or something but I can't buy it because it's not on chain.

>> So are you then you're then at the at the you're beholden to >> Yeah. I think you'd be surprised by the velocity of these things at which they're moving like especially trade XYZ uh moving all these assets on per and and also like a lot like there's like five tokenized equity platforms announced in the past year that are all starting to add a ton of assets. So I think the velocity, yes, we're encumbered by that, but the velocity is very promising. And I think like if there was ever a time to build, it's now. >> I think the one thing I would cover um is based on what Se said, the one other missing piece is that the social is the glue, right? Where you could express a thesis and use these instruments as a mechanism. And I kind of talked about Meta earlier, but there was that one day

where Meta is like, "Okay, we're going to use our excess compute for distri distributing to other businesses." You saw Meta Stock RIP and all these other stocks fall. Well, now I can get context instead of like 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 thesis 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. Well, I can discover that. Then I follow Jason because he's smart and he's going to have good thesis in the future. I could see everyone else that like had that thesis and I could start to understand what's happening in the market and then position myself. And I think in the age of AI, everyone is thinking about these like trading interfaces that people can

just like use information and then and then execute trades. But the edge of execution is actually going to get like evened out and commoditize. If we're we both have the same platform and we have like the same access to information, what actually becomes important is the research. So you could use AI as like a research tool, etc. But then you still have to like kind of cohhere and understand like what the trade should be. But 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 and trade information.

So I think that's really important. You talk about other business lines like in a world where you know all alpha discovery happens on FOMO, you could just have a paid API where every agent, every infrastructure platform, every trading platform needs to be able to subscribe to kind of similar to like you know a data platform subscription or some sorts. >> Yeah. Yeah. I like it. >> For our proprietary data and then like maybe you can use an exchang Yeah. The exchanges make a ton of money >> selling their data. Not in crypto yet they will but traditional I mean NASDAQ is a you know multi-billion dollar data business, >> right? >> Yeah. And I even think like I'm actually bullish on Figma. I think it's a hot take because everyone's like, "Oh, cloud design, etc." But you could have an AI make a design for you, but then what I

want is to generate a vector file that in Figma I could play around with. And it's the same on FOMO. Like maybe I have the AI execute a trade, but I want that a trade to appear on my FOMO profile. I want to have this beautiful view where I could view it in real time, kind of keep updated on it, etc. And I think that balance is really important. So, I'm really bullish on user interfaces and building great products for users and I think Figma's doing that and that's kind of uh FOMO's view on it as well. >> Yeah, I tend to agree with that. Um a friend Chiao Wang who runs Alliance Alliance Dow and um yeah, I saw his tweet earlier today. He said, "I think over a three-year time horizon, crypto will meaningfully outperform stocks."

Agree or disagree? >> Starting today? >> Starting today? >> I would agree. >> Agree. Starting today, agree. >> Starting today, agree. At least like the I mean you you kind of see alts always like go up and go down and allow and die but I think like core assets that are going to be real value to you know investors and traders will meaningfully uh outpace. >> Why do you so strongly agree? >> Well I think that stocks are at a have ran up a lot uh recently and I think it's like one of two views. I think that we are overleveraged in our view of how impactful we're either overleveraging our in in our view of how impactful AI will be or very underleveraged in the case then it exponentially rips. If we're overleveraged then we're kind of

predicting all of these sales of future cash flows for compute etc. And there's a lot of things in the supply chain that could be bottlenecks to that whether it's scaling energy scaling compute etc. Um whereas crypto I think is at like a low a local minimum for sure. You know, yeah. I think my view on it also is like you think about the technology that's being developed and just how the stock market works today. We're now at this like really awkward place where companies are refusing to go public until they're 5 10 50 or 1.7 trillion or whatever SpaceX was, right? So, it creates this like really weird problem where how do you get access to that? And I think that the answer is crypto. I think it's through preIPO per through places like Hyperlquid where price discovery natively happens for you know you saw with Cabris you saw with SpaceX.

I think that continues to happen and what ends up happening is like the life cycle of the trade just gets earlier and earlier and earlier and I think that can only happen on crypto guardrail. So now where does the value acrew it's to whoever is housing all these things and the platforms that can do it you know for the normal person you know a year earlier than whatever the actual public IPO is. So I think on that view alone like 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 you know crypto allows you to do these things much much earlier. >> Yeah. Yeah. I agree with all that. Um, will you guys launch a token? >> No plans for that.

>> No, there's no plans for that. >> Would Would you Do 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. >> Yeah. How go? >> Um, I think when you launch a token, it becomes the entire product. We still have to do these other companies. And if we were ever to do something like that, we want it to be a compliant way where you actually have ownership of the product, etc. And and like it's basically representation of ownership of the platform because I think when that's divorced, that model has proven to to not work out time and time again.

>> You don't think I mean it's in the very hot topic today with with Venice obviously and other stuff. You you don't think that the dual model can work, equity and token. >> It's tough. I mean historically really hasn't, right? And I think that a lot of that is regulation, right? they don't let you actually do these things in a way that's compliant with, you know, whatever frameworks exist today. Um, but I think the other point about like 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, you know, be offered as an individual stock, part of ETFs, part of, you know, whatever indices. And that builds a lot of trust with consumer. I'm not sure that, you know, Robin Hood 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 is making sure, you know, they're doing the right things. are saying compliant and everybody can see it publicly. So, that's an important aspect as well, but a lot of nuance there. Obviously, we're excited to see our regulation continues to shift over the years. >> Yeah. Nice. Um, 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 we worked at investment bank for a little bit and when you're IPOing, you have like the biggest investment bank with the massive rolodex actually run a road show for you of distribution liquidity. No one has ever done that for a crypto token. And like that's the silly thing to me. It's like why don't these things work out?

you have this one guy in house going to these like random smaller crypto market makers, having these like really unfair deals that are just going to crash the token price rather than creating like a sustainable model that has taken us decades to actually work out in traditional financial markets. And I think that like financing distribution for actually going public like maybe eventually like it for token launches converges what it looks like for IPO you know but right now I think there's like no mechanism to actually do that right. >> Yeah. Have you thought about like could you compete with some of the the centralized exchanges for listings?

>> Well, everything's automatically available on FOMO and we don't actually do any listing. Verification is just kind of a nominal view to actually help with protect consumers. So, it's like this is not a scam token. That's like the main use case of that. >> Yeah. I think with the IPO road show it's like if I'm launching a token >> it's like it might be actually better to launch on >> you know FOMO today than like second tier exchange. >> Yeah. So >> I think it is. >> Yeah. >> Because we don't we don't charge you a dick for it either. Just available. >> Oh, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, exactly. There's so much money uh going into these deals. So >> Jens, congrats on everything. Um it's been running the company for 18 months now.

>> Yeah, a little over 18 months. Amazing to see what you guys have done and yeah, rooting for you guys. >> Appreciate it. Thanks for having us. Cool. Cheers. Heat. Heat.