A Founder’s Reflection: Why Did Fomo Run Further Than Us from the Same Starting Point?

Original Title: What Watching Fomo's Rise Taught Me About Vector
Original Author: @philjacobson, Altitude
Original Translation: Golem, Odaily Planet Daily

A few years ago, we developed Vector, a mobile social trading application for on-chain assets. Our business grew rapidly, reaching a peak daily trading volume of over $20 million from a zero start, with a cumulative trading volume of about $1 billion. In the first few months after the product launch, as growth accelerated, our user retention resembled that of a social network rather than a traditional trading application, which was exactly the form we aimed to create.

However, by the end of 2025, we sold the company to Coinbase.

Since then, I have been closely watching how Fomo has taken a similar concept and product in a different direction, achieving remarkable execution results. They successfully broke through the CT (Crypto Twitter) circle, attracting a large number of new users into the on-chain world, and recently their daily trading volume has surpassed $100 million.

Seeing their success, I do not feel that it "should have been ours." On the contrary, I think their achievements are incredible. They adopted the product philosophy we once firmly believed in and focused it on a market we had never truly ventured into, realizing this vision on a scale far beyond ours.

The whole process fascinates me, and I can't help but imagine that in some parallel universe, we might have taken a completely different path...

All Interesting Products Initially Look Like "Toys"

The birth of Vector actually originated from the Solana NFT trading platform Tensor.

Before joining Tensor as Vice President of Operations, I participated as an angel investor in Tensor's only round of financing, when the project had almost no market share. By the time I officially joined, Tensor had become the dominant NFT trading platform on the Solana chain, with a market share exceeding 80% and trading volumes reaching billions of dollars.

About the second day after I joined, Ilja approached me and said, "We are not sure about the future direction of the NFT space, but we believe the next wave will be Meme coins, so we plan to develop a product for that."

Our insight was not just recognizing that Meme coins would become the next hot asset class; we also believed that the greater opportunity lay in "social trading."

Trading behavior itself already possesses social attributes. The GameStop incident and the WallStreetBets community are obvious examples. More and more people are starting to invest independently, and their decision-making increasingly relies on trusted individuals online rather than traditional financial advisors or institutions.

The cryptocurrency space has made this behavior even more pronounced. There are always people on X who can capture important trading opportunities first; Ansem is a great example, as he was very bullish on and promoted the project when Solana was only around $8. If you trust his judgment and act accordingly, you can achieve astonishing returns.

The problem is that discovering opportunities and executing trades are often two completely disconnected processes.

You might see trusted individuals posting information about a certain token in X or Telegram groups, deciding whether to enter, and then looking for the correct contract address. On mobile, the actual execution experience is very poor; you need to open the Phantom wallet, then open a browser, find the Jupiter platform, connect your wallet, paste the contract address, verify the token, set the trading size, and finally execute the trade. For Meme coins, time is money. By the time you complete this series of operations, the opportunity may have already slipped away.

Therefore, we firmly believe that social signals and trade execution should be integrated into the same product, and the distance between the two should be minimized to zero.

Chris Dixon, founder of a16z crypto, once made a famous point: all interesting products initially look like "toys." That’s how we viewed Meme coins; they are the "toys" that can kickstart social trading networks.

Our long-term vision was far beyond this. As more mainstream assets go on-chain, this network will naturally expand into those asset areas. Once we have captured users, built a social graph around trading and excess returns, and provided an exceptional execution experience, the threshold for transitioning from Meme coins to stocks or other assets will no longer be so high, especially considering that these assets themselves are increasingly moving on-chain.

Admittedly, stocks usually have real businesses behind them, while Meme coins often do not; however, more and more signs indicate that the actual trading methods of the two are surprisingly similar.

The GameStop incident is an extreme early case, but such behavior has become increasingly common. Look at trades in memory chips, new-generation cloud services, or large-scale cloud vendors; these trades have strong social attributes and are driven by narratives and market momentum.

Leopold Aschenbrenner is a recent typical example. With his unique insights into the development of AI, he has built a high level of credibility. Now, investors closely watch and mimic his positions in companies like Bloom Energy, CoreWeave, and Micron. His reputation and firm beliefs have become part of the information people reference when evaluating and executing related trades.

Some of these investment logics will ultimately prove correct, while others will not; this can only be known in hindsight. But it is evident that the information aspect surrounding investments has begun to exhibit social characteristics.

We believe that the most extreme behavioral patterns exhibited in the Meme coin space are not unique to Meme coins; they are actually an amplification of a broader market development trend.

When You Realize What True PMF Feels Like

The simplest way to explain Vector or Fomo is to see it as a combination of Instagram and Robinhood. The core element of Instagram is photos, TikTok is short videos, and for Vector, the core element is charts.

When you open the app, the first thing users see is the social information feed. When someone shares a trade, users will see the real-time price chart of that token, and the buy or sell actions of users trading through Vector will be directly displayed at the corresponding positions on the chart.

The information feed is driven by algorithms designed to present the most valuable trading signals in the network. Upon seeing a signal, users can complete a trade almost instantly. Our goal is to shorten the path from "social signal to executing a trade" from minutes to seconds, or ideally to milliseconds, contrasting sharply with the poor state of mobile trading at that time.

One concept we pioneered was to display user avatars and trading dynamics directly on the chart. No one had done this before; I remember thinking when I saw this design internally, "This is simply genius." Today, this UI pattern has become standard across various trading applications, and it’s really great to see.

For product-market fit (PMF), our founding team has a simple definition: PMF means that the demand for the product is so strong that you can’t supply it fast enough; users will compete to "snatch" the product from your hands. Before the official launch, we realized that Vector was successful because this explosive scene had already appeared during the internal testing phase, with users constantly urging us for invitation codes to bring their friends in.

We launched at the end of November 2024 and quickly became popular in the cryptocurrency community on Twitter (now called X). Our daily trading volume soon reached about $1 million; by late January, during the release period of Trump-related Meme coins, the peak daily trading volume even exceeded $20 million.

User retention was also astonishing. Although I don’t remember the exact numbers, I recall that the 7-day retention rate was between 60% and 70%, and the 30-day retention rate was around 40% to 50%. Users frequently opened Vector to trade, follow each other, share investment views, invite friends, and trade based on the people they followed.

At that time, our team had fewer than 25 people, and the pressure brought by this explosive growth was everywhere: system failures were frequent, trades occasionally could not be executed, the customer service team was overwhelmed, and the features to be developed always outnumbered the available manpower.

This experience gave me a deep understanding of what true PMF is; it was the most profound lesson I have ever learned. Demand was creating pressure everywhere, pushing everything forward at a speed faster than the company could actually handle.

This also reinforced my firm belief about building a company: a small team composed of highly talented individuals can achieve amazing results, and nothing is more important than maintaining close contact with customers. A customer-centric culture must be exemplified by the leadership; if you do not engage directly with users, provide support, and understand the shortcomings of the product, it is easy to become disconnected from reality and unable to grasp the true needs of the product.

A Misstep: Betting on the Professional Trading Market

However, as the Meme coin market cooled down, a structural issue became increasingly apparent.

Ordinary users often end up losing most of their principal, leading to reduced trading or even complete withdrawal; professional traders, on the other hand, can make money, continue trading, and contribute a massive trading volume. This economic structure exhibits extreme concentration, with about 5% of users contributing approximately 95% of the trading volume.

Therefore, we made a rational choice at that time to target the professional trading market. Their needs differ from those of ordinary users; they typically face multiple screens, monitor multiple charts, and engage in frequent rapid entries and exits. Vector is a mobile product and indeed has many professionals using it, but for them, mobile is often just a supplement to their primary trading environment, not the main trading venue.

At the same time, market competition became increasingly fierce. Axiom created an excellent product, and competitors like Photon and BullX were also vying for the same group of users. Given that professional traders contributed the vast majority of trading volume, we began developing a desktop version of Vector, which seemed to be the best way to win the market by becoming the preferred trading interface for professional traders.

To this day, I still believe that it was a very viable strategy. Our desktop product was outstanding, and the early beta users responded enthusiastically. We also developed a confident marketing plan. However, we ultimately did not publicly release it, so we could not truly validate this strategy.

Looking back, I have another perspective on our choice at that time. We focused on winning the existing market rather than committing to the incremental market. We spent too little time thinking about whether we could significantly expand the market by attracting new users who had never engaged in on-chain transactions.

And this is precisely the path that Fomo ultimately chose.

The Unique Aspects of Fomo's Success

What interests me most about Fomo is its strategic focus. When we developed the desktop product, the obvious market opportunity was to serve professional traders. At that time, Axiom was growing rapidly, and the professional trader community dominated the market's economic benefits. Numerous products were fiercely competing for this group, which was the focus of the entire industry at that time.

However, Fomo chose a completely different path.

They turned their attention to audiences outside of TikTok, Instagram, and the CT circle, many of whom had never engaged in on-chain transactions before. They did not compete for seasoned traders; instead, they targeted a massive consumer market that most other companies in the industry overlooked at that time.

Timing was also crucial. Fomo rose after the frenzy of meme coins had subsided, and the market environment was no longer as crazy and speculative as when we were operating. I am not sure if the same strategy would have been effective during the peak of the frenzy, but they targeted a different user group at the right time and executed it exceptionally well.

They found ways to reach users outside the traditional cryptocurrency circle, guide them to use the product, and facilitate their first on-chain transaction. This was no easy feat, as it required excellent distribution channels and outstanding products, making the concept of "on-chain transactions," which is quite unfamiliar to ordinary people, simple, while successfully converting users and providing reasons for them to continue using it.

Fomo accurately grasped the product experience details valued by this target audience. If we had not adjusted our product for these users and merely placed the original Vector into these distribution channels, we would not have achieved the same results.

However, I do not believe our decision to serve professional traders was wrong; I still firmly believe that our desktop strategy could have been a great success. The more valuable insight is that there exists a much larger market outside the one we were deeply engaged in, and we did not invest enough time to explore it, while Fomo did and successfully opened up the situation.

It turns out that the market that helps you achieve PMF may not support you in achieving large-scale growth.

The first target market that entrepreneurs find may be the perfect "beachhead," but it may only represent a small portion of the ultimate market opportunity. Once you find the product that users truly desire, another question worth considering is: in what other areas can this product shine?

Hindsight is always easy, but it is much harder to gain insight during actual operations. Your data comes from the current market you serve, and while this data can strongly guide you on how to win the existing market, it is difficult to reveal the situation of users you have not yet acquired or distribution channels that have not been fully tested.

For us, the data at that time indicated that professional traders dominated the economic ecology of on-chain meme coin trading. However, what the data could not predict was what would happen if a social trading product were pushed to a group of completely new users who had never engaged in on-chain transactions.

Fomo has already provided the answer.

Is Social Trading a Trillion-Dollar Opportunity?

What Fomo has made me more certain of is that the initial assertions about social trading were not only correct in direction but that the growth rate and scale of this opportunity far exceed our initial expectations.

We live in an increasingly financialized world, where more and more people are starting to invest and trade independently. Market dynamics have become a hot topic of public discussion, investment concepts are spreading through social networks, and people are establishing trust in specific traders, investors, and creators, while capital flows along these information and consensus networks.

Trading and investing have inherently become social activities. This applies to all types of assets, whether meme coins, cryptocurrencies, prediction markets, or even the stock market.

I believe this trend will only accelerate. The world is becoming more interconnected, the speed of information dissemination is increasing, and AI will greatly enhance the ability to discover and integrate information. Meanwhile, more and more assets are migrating on-chain, including stocks, prediction markets, options, real-world assets (RWA), and various financial products that we have yet to conceive, all converging onto an increasingly globalized and round-the-clock financial infrastructure.

If you can build a high-quality social graph around trading and excess returns, supported by excellent execution, you will occupy a highly advantageous position. Meme coins can serve as an entry point, but the development of the product goes far beyond this. As the financial world migrates more on-chain, asset classes will become increasingly modular.

This has always been part of Vector's vision, but Fomo's growth journey has given me a more concrete understanding of its scale and timing. People are ready to engage in on-chain trading and embrace a socialized financial experience. Fomo has proven that this experience can indeed reach a vast audience beyond the crypto-native market.

I believe they are in a very favorable position. They have begun to venture into perpetual contracts, surpassing the mere realm of meme coins. If they can maintain good execution, their development opportunities will be extremely broad. A typical comparable entity is Robinhood, but Fomo has embedded a social graph and on-chain asset system into its product from the very beginning.

Conclusion

If we had persisted, could Vector have grown into a company valued at tens of billions of dollars?

I believe it is entirely possible. It might even be much more than that. We had an excellent product, a talented team, and a strategy that I believe had great potential for success. Perhaps we would have used this as a starting point to eventually enter a broader consumer market; perhaps Fomo would still defeat us; or perhaps we would develop even larger than today's Fomo.

Maybe one day, quantum technology will allow us to realize this wish in a parallel universe. For now, what interests me most is watching another excellent team (Fomo) explore a path we have not ventured into.

I am witnessing all of this as an observer. They have opened up a market that we did not truly engage in back then and have pushed the social trading model to heights far beyond what we achieved. I have great respect for everything they have built.

More importantly, witnessing this process has made me increasingly convinced that financial markets inherently possess strong social attributes, and as more global assets migrate on-chain, this attribute will undoubtedly be further enhanced.

At the beginning, we attempted to build an early prototype of this future form through Vector, and Fomo's development trajectory is showing us just how vast this field's future scale can be.

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