Markets remain under pressure, and venture funding has slowed down. Against that backdrop, social trading platform Fomo has raised $75 million in a round led by Index Ventures at a $550 million valuation, with participation from Union Square Ventures and Benchmark. The funding reflects growing investor conviction that the next wave of crypto adoption may be driven by better ways of discovering trades.
Part of what changed is the rulebook. Shortly before Fomo’s round, U.S. regulators clarified that non-custodial crypto apps like it don’t have to register as broker-dealers, removing a hurdle that had pushed much of this activity overseas. Several investors point to that shift. “The cash chasing Fomo isn’t really about trading — it’s a race to own an audience now that the path is clear,” Jeff Barrington, founder and managing director of technology M&A advisory firm Windsor Drake, told me in written responses. Venture capitalist Tim Draper, responding in writing, framed it the same way — a restrictive regulatory regime had pushed this activity abroad, and a friendlier one is now drawing it back.
Social Trading
Founded in 2025 by former dYdX executives Se Yong Park, Paul Erlanger, and Prashan Dharmasena, Fomo combines multi-chain trading with a social feed where users can follow friends, traders, and public portfolios in real time. Speaking on the Bankless podcast, Park described the company’s mission as building “trading for the rest of us.”
Over the past year, many of crypto’s venture rounds have gone to infrastructure, payments, stablecoins, and institutional financial services. Fomo is a rare case building the interface rather than the rails. As crypto onboarding becomes easier and more users enter through familiar payment methods like Apple Pay and bank transfers, venture investors are betting that the next competitive advantage will come from owning the place where users discover investment ideas.
“Social trading can significantly improve the high customer acquisition costs that have plagued consumer fintech for years,” Paul Veradittakit, managing partner at Pantera Capital, wrote in response to my questions. “When a platform uses shared trades, leaderboards, and social signals, virality is baked into the product.”
The app brings together what traders previously managed across multiple platforms into one experience: discovery, execution, identity, reputation, and visible buys and sells. Users can sign in with Google or Apple, fund an account with Apple Pay, a debit card, a bank transfer, or crypto, and begin trading.
According to the company, Fomo has attracted roughly 650,000 signups, with about 30% converting into traders. Around 70,000 users entered through traditional fiat onramps rather than crypto-native rails, suggesting the platform is reaching beyond crypto’s existing audience.
The trend toward social trading is reinforced by other companies. Robinhood recently launched Robinhood Social in beta, a feed for discovering and tracking traders, while other crypto startups are experimenting with public portfolios, copy trading, and social feeds that allow users to follow experienced traders.
“For most people, the first time they hear about a trade is from a friend, whether it’s a message in a group chat or someone they follow online,” Femi Awomosu, head of product at Phantom Wallet, wrote to me. “Crypto has always been inherently social. As open networks have matured, they’ve made it even easier to discover and learn from the world’s best traders, and that’s a theme I think we’ll continue to see develop over time.”
Discovery has moved upstream, and the place where investors first encounter an idea is also where they evaluate it, build conviction, and execute a trade.
Trading remains a player versus player (PvP) activity, where users constantly search for informational and timing advantages. A trader can accumulate a position from private wallets, buy publicly to signal conviction, attract followers, and exit once others begin buying. Greater transparency makes this behavior easier to detect. Park’s hope is that persistent onchain identities and public track records create accountability over time, making it harder for bad actors to build lasting credibility.
Prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi have already shown how social capital can make financial products more engaging. Public positions, visible track records, and reputation have turned forecasting into something people follow as much as they participate in. Social trading is extending that model to crypto investing and beyond it. “Once you build a sticky, transparent social layer, you can easily scale from crypto into tokenized equities and commodities,” Veradittakit added.
Fomo’s latest funding suggests investors believe social feeds can win the next battle for users’ attention.