fomo co-founder Se Yong said in an Aug. 12 podcast interview that the platform has grown to about 1.3 million users and is currently adding roughly 30,000 new users a day. He said fomo is not aiming to become an established pro meme trading terminal. The product, as he described it, is built around making trading easier, faster, and more social, while reaching well beyond crypto Twitter.
The interview, from Maurits and compiled by Odaily Planet Daily’s Golem, also covered Se Yong’s early crypto experience, his own trading style, and the thinking behind fomo’s push into mobile and social trading.
Early crypto experience began with Avalanche and expanded across chains
Se Yong said he first got into crypto through trading. In 2021, while using Avalanche, he came across a leaked RPC tied to an account called sad start. At the time, he said, he did not understand cross-chain activity or even what RPC meant. That account walked him through the concepts step by step and framed Avalanche and the broader EVM world as an alternative to expensive Ethereum trading.
He said his returns quickly went from a few hundred dollars to five figures, which he described as an important moment for anyone involved in crypto trading. After that, he started trading across nearly every chain he could access: Ethereum mainnet, BSC, TRON, Solana, various layer-2 networks, and newer ecosystems including Sui, Injective, and Sei. The experience on each chain felt different, but the process also pushed him toward building something of his own.
He pointed to another moment from roughly two years ago. Friends of his found a token called Keeta on Base and each bought around $10,000 worth. He said they later made seven-figure gains. He wanted to buy too, but he had no funds on Base. To get there, he would have had to set up Rabby Wallet, find a bridge, and work out which frontend to use. In his words, a task that should have taken 45 seconds had become far too much work. That friction helped crystallize one of the problems fomo wanted to solve for other users.
Not a classic meme scalper, more of a holder
Se Yong said he has never been a typical meme trader using Telegram bots or specialized browser terminals all day. He tried the lifestyle of sitting at a desk for 16 hours, studying every meme token and trying to decode its narrative. He said plainly that he is not especially good at that style of trading.
That matters, in his view, because not everyone can decode meme narratives quickly. Some top traders can. He cannot. Even in a bull market, he said, he might only make three trades in a week. He tends to buy only when a token’s story really grabs him.
He named GME as one example. After the Roaring Kitty documentary came out, he thought the token had a strong narrative and a lot of people were talking about it, so he bought it. He also mentioned Pandora, an ERC-404 token with both token and NFT characteristics. He said he found the design compelling, entered early, and considers it one of his most successful trades.
Even so, he described himself as someone who rarely catches the perfect entry or exit. He is more of a diamond hands trader who keeps conviction even through drawdowns.
The five traders he highlighted: GCR, Kobe, Flood, Ansem, and change
Asked to name his five favorite top traders, Se Yong put GCR first and called his story legendary. He named Kobe second, especially when he was younger. Flood came third; Se Yong said Flood was early in seeing HYPE. Fourth was Ansem. He acknowledged that Ansem gets criticized from time to time, but said many of his calls over the last five years have been broadly accurate, including his early read on SOL and several meme coins.
Some of those people, he said, are already trading on fomo, while he has spoken with others who are not active on-chain. He added that veteran traders often have to protect their reputation and many fade from public view after they have already made it, with Ansem standing out as someone who remains in the spotlight.
Still, Se Yong said he would rather see fomo support a new generation of traders than rely too heavily on famous names. He wants the platform to record the full journey of people who start from nothing and grow in public. Every social platform, he argued, needs a place where homegrown heroes can emerge. Pulling in already-famous traders is not always helpful if it ends up crowding out newer ones.
His fifth pick was change, whom he identified as the current No. 1 trader on the fomo leaderboard for some time now.
Influence matters more than valuation or fees
When speaking about the platform’s end goal, Se Yong said the single most important thing is influence. He said the team spent a great deal of time thinking about how to build a product that can truly reach users and get into the hands of people they trust, along with people who want to try something they have not experienced before.
He said many strong companies in crypto and finance are working on the same gap, but none has solved it perfectly. The question for fomo is how to make a product that 7.8 billion people can use with ease. That requires a smooth user experience, social interaction, and a level of excitement that keeps people engaged.
By his framing, metrics such as valuation, funding, or fees are not the deepest drivers of product growth. Users and influence are.
1.3 million users, 30,000 daily additions, and a slow start in the early days
Se Yong said fomo now has roughly 1.3 million users and has recently been adding about 30,000 users per day. He said other founders often ask how the company seemed to move so quickly from its first 1,000 users to 100,000 and beyond.
His answer was that the early stage was anything but easy. He said the team raised 140 angel investors at the start, yet for several months the product did not even have 140 users. It took a long time to build up a base of people who would return every day, test the product, and share feedback.
He singled out users from May 2025 through July 2025, saying he remains deeply grateful to those early adopters because they came back daily, told the team what was broken, and pointed out what needed work.
Founders, he said, need to listen carefully to their core 5,000 users. Build something excellent for that group first, and it becomes possible to build for many more. Too many teams fixate on reaching 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000 users immediately and miss the value of the earliest committed users.
Why users come in: simpler cross-chain trading and public trust signals
Se Yong said fomo was founded around two principles. The first was making the product as easy as possible for ordinary users. The second was earning user trust.
Most ordinary users do not really care about the distinction between SOL, ETH, and BNB, he said. So the product tries to reduce that complexity and present funds as a usable cash balance. He added that the vision is not fully complete yet, but fomo wants to become the fastest way to trade.
If users hold balances in both EVM and SOL accounts on the same platform, trading across chains usually forces them to switch back and forth. That costs time. It also means understanding system setup, managing wallets, holding private keys, and waiting through steps that most users do not want to think about.
He said fomo’s current cross-chain trading flow takes about 3 to 5 seconds and that the goal is to bring that down to 1 second. The intended outcome is simple: users should stop thinking about cross-chain mechanics entirely and trade anywhere from a single account balance.
The second principle is social capital. Se Yong said users want to build status through their trading. Some traders have only 300 followers but hold balances in the eight-figure range. Others have 100,000 followers but only six-figure balances and still draw more attention. In that environment, he said, there needs to be a clearer public way to determine who is actually good.
That is why fomo put in a public leaderboard. If someone says they are the best, his view is that they should be able to prove it in public. Some people will not care about rankings, and that is fine. But over time, money fades, reputation fades, and many things disappear. What remains is the record and the legacy attached to it.
The target user base extends beyond crypto-native audiences
On user behavior, Se Yong said the ideal pattern would be a lower median trade size as the product expands, paired with a higher average trade size. He said that is not what has happened in practice. Instead, more long-tail users are joining, including people who may not even have $100 but still trade and learn on the platform.
He stressed that the company’s focus is not centered on crypto Twitter, or even only on crypto users. In his words, it may not even be fully accurate anymore to describe fomo as just a crypto company. The ambition is to become a platform where people can trade anything and to build a social graph for finance, which he sees as much broader than crypto and CT.
That approach has led the company to test things many Web3 firms have not leaned into, including pushing user-generated content to TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. He said many crypto companies dismiss those channels as ineffective for growth because their own user bases are still in the 10,000 to 30,000 range. fomo, by contrast, keeps testing new ideas every day.
Not building a pro meme terminal, but the web product is due for upgrades
Asked whether fomo would eventually provide a more advanced terminal for professional traders, Se Yong said the platform will never become that kind of pro meme terminal.
That said, he also made clear the team is not rigid. It still listens to users and studies the best use cases. He said bluntly that the current fomo web app is not in great shape and has remained close to its launch-state version.
Even so, web traffic is now approaching 25% of the platform’s total traffic. For him, that means the product has reached a stage where more iteration is required. He listed token discovery, social discovery, and easier purchase flows as examples of functions users need. Those can all exist in the browser, he said, but the team does not want to make the interface feel like a spaceship. The goal is more capability without sacrificing ease of use.
Clans launched on Aug. 11 as an early social layer
fomo rolled out its Clans feature on Aug. 11. Se Yong said the current version is still very basic. Users can see everyone in a group and the tokens they hold, and anyone can join a group and compete on the leaderboard.
He said forms of competition like this have always existed, whether through Binance-style rankings or KOL lists, but not with the level of transparency fomo is pushing toward now. The broader goal is to make information public across traders, prediction markets, spot markets, and even profit figures. If someone is the highest-earning trader, the product should show it clearly.
Clans, in his view, are a natural way to do that because trading should be social and should also involve teamwork.
He described the current release as only a primitive first version. Over time, he said, users could get internal chat, member recruitment, subscription services, shared treasuries, and even public clan addresses that could receive airdrops. He gave an example of a respected group known for holding certain tokens for the long term and therefore qualifying for direct airdrops.
There are many ways for clans to make money, he said, and the model resembles influence monetization. A lot of that activity has taken place quietly in the past. fomo wants to bring it into the open, even if that causes short-term discomfort.
Moonshot helped shape the thesis on mobile and social trading
Se Yong said the move toward mobile trading is obvious because most services in the world are already shifting to mobile. Young and old users alike are on their phones. For him, this is not a new transition but one that is already in its middle to later phase.
He also linked the rise of social trading to Moonshot’s success around November 2024. In his view, Moonshot shipped the first meaningful version of a mobile trading app in this category.
He showed that app to his friends, and five of them eventually downloaded it. They made a few hundred dollars on Moonshot. He said that for an ordinary person, making $300 in a week is real money, enough to save or simply enough to noticeably change everyday spending. He then told those friends to cash out and put the money in the bank because the trade was tied to an internet-hot token. None of them listened, and all of them gave the gains back.
That made him dig deeper into why users lose their edge. He said many first successful trades happen because someone stumbles into an advantage, such as spotting a viral hippo trend on TikTok. But if they cannot see what top traders are doing and cannot communicate with others in real time, that edge quickly disappears.
That is where he and co-founder Paul aligned: trading has to be social. Traders need real-time conversation and immediate access to information about markets and tokens, instead of searching across Telegram groups, Discord servers, and scattered accounts. Users need to know who is buying what, where the market is moving, and how sentiment is shifting. That line of thinking led directly to fomo.
On competition: the goal is to make the pie bigger
Se Yong said competition is a good thing because fomo was built to make the pie bigger and improve the market. He broke that into two ideas.
First, competition is useful because users will end up choosing the best product. If fomo has the best product, great. If not, then the company does not deserve to win. Second, competition is inevitable. No company becomes great without going through it.
He said the team’s view is that if failure is coming, they would rather face it now than later because failure teaches. He would rather gather those lessons today, tomorrow, the day after, and throughout the company’s life.
He also cited board member Chetan, who told him that the biggest existential threat to a company is never having gone through a crisis. In that sense, he said, competition is healthy. Someone is going to expand the market. Why should it not be fomo?
His estimate for when eight-figure trading profits appear on the platform
Near the end of the interview, Se Yong was asked how long it would take before someone on fomo posts an eight-figure profit. He said the market has remained in a bear phase, which makes it hard to picture what a bull market would look like. Even so, his estimate was six months. By then, he said, many people could be making that kind of money, and the top 100 names on the leaderboard may look completely different from today because new opportunities keep appearing.