After meme activity on RobinHood and Fomo caught fire, X has been flooded with tools that try to identify Fomo-linked wallets. In a long essay from Ant.fun, later carried by MarsBit, the author lists the now-familiar features: enter a Fomo username and extract the bound address with one click; reverse-search a wallet to find the matching Fomo account; label those accounts in block explorers and trading dashboards at scale; then add leaderboards, profit tracking, APIs, and Chrome extensions. The article even points to a more primitive method: open a user page, press F12, and inspect the returned address field in network requests.
The author’s central claim is blunt. This kind of tool has shown up in every cycle since 2017, but this time the market has missed a key shift: the method itself no longer works the way people think it does. In the essay’s telling, each tool may only take a few hundred lines of code and a weekend to ship. What it is trying to beat, though, is a company that has raised close to $100 million and is backed by more than 140 angel investors as well as Benchmark.
The old assumption behind wallet tracking no longer holds
For the past two years, “smart money” has been one of the strongest narratives in Chinese-language on-chain circles. Wallet monitoring, address labeling, and copy-trading bots all rest on the same idea: blockchains are transparent, early movers leave visible traces, and anyone who spots those traces a few seconds ahead of others can share in the upside.
The essay says that thesis made sense during Solana’s meme bull run. Profitable wallets were often tied to identifiable individuals who had information advantages, communities, and reasons to build positions early. Their behavior could be recognized, then copied. Catch the wallet, and to some extent, you caught the person behind it.
According to the author, that is not how profit leaders emerge on Fomo. Fomo is described as a platform, not just a tool. On that platform, top KOLs may be profitable not only because they are better traders, but because the platform has reasons to make sure they look profitable. A social trading product needs new users to walk in, see that “people are making money here,” then follow, copy, and stay. In the essay’s framework, the platform has both the capital and the incentive to make that happen. It can decide who gets traffic, which assets are pushed to the top of the feed, and how subsidies are used to shape the early profit curves of selected KOLs.
A “junket operator” analogy for KOL economics
The author calls this the “junket operator mechanism.” The comparison comes from Macau casinos, where casinos do not always bring in gamblers directly. They work through junket operators who recruit players and receive a share in return. A junket operator may appear to be winning at the table, but the income is tied to the casino’s arrangement. In the article’s view, top Fomo KOLs play a similar role: they post winning screenshots on X, bring in users, and may not even realize they are functioning as distribution channels for the platform.
The essay pushes the analogy further by invoking Dostoevsky’s The Gambler. People studying roulette believed they had found patterns, but roulette never cared about patterns. It cared about probability, while the casino cared about the rake. On that logic, the people parsing wallet addresses today are structurally similar to those trying to decode roulette 150 years ago.
That leads to the article’s key point about copy trading. If you track the wallet of a “junket operator” and buy after them, you are not really following the judgment of an individual. You are following a company’s operating strategy. The company can replace one set of KOLs with another and rewrite the distribution rules whenever it wants. A scraping tool will always lag. Every line of code in those tools assumes there is a person on the other side. Once the other side becomes a Benchmark-backed company, the author argues, the code is left with little more than academic value.
The investor roster, in the author’s reading, marks the end of the grassroots phase
The essay says broken tracking tools are only the surface symptom. The deeper shift is that crypto is no longer a grassroots industry in the way it once was. For years, one of the sector’s biggest attractions was how generous it could be to individuals. One person, one idea, one product built over a weekend could still generate outsized returns. The author groups 2017’s ICO wave, 2021’s DeFi cycle, and 2024’s meme market under that broader story. Chinese-language communities, the piece says, were built on that belief as much as anyone.
Now, the author says, that phase is over, and the clearest signal is Fomo’s cap table. The article notes that Benchmark Capital and Index Ventures are not crypto-native venture firms. Benchmark is described as an early investor in Uber, eBay, and Twitter, and as one of the oldest mobile internet funds in the US. Index is framed as a top-tier consumer internet investor in Europe and the US. The point is not just who invested, but how they invest. The essay argues that these firms are not backing Fomo as an on-chain protocol or a token project. They are backing it as a mobile internet company with financial monetization built in.
To make that case, the article revisits Uber. It says Benchmark invested more than $10 million in Uber’s Series A and later made billions. Uber’s playbook, in the author’s summary, was to use investor capital to subsidize drivers and riders, build both sides of the network first, and only then lean into monetization. Fomo’s subsidies for KOLs and its role in producing “winning” assets follow the same structure, the essay argues: KOLs are the supply side, trading users are the demand side, and the platform spends money early to cultivate supply.
From there, the valuation logic changes. Traditional crypto VCs may look at tokenomics or TVL. Consumer internet VCs look at DAU, retention, and ARPU. If Fomo is priced with the second framework rather than the first, the article says, then it has been built from day one like a consumer internet platform: account systems, network effects, growth teams, capital reserves, and control over KOL distribution. In that structure, it is not a tool. It is a platform. A tool derives value from users; a platform can shape its own value.
Control on-chain has swung back and forth between East and West
The article also makes a broader market claim: many of the Chinese KOLs who dominated the previous Solana meme cycle have effectively vanished from today’s profit rankings. The author is careful with the wording. They have not disappeared from the market itself, the essay says. They have disappeared from the list of winners.
The explanation is that the logic has changed. In the prior cycle, information asymmetry ruled. Whoever knew first, won first. Communities, insider access, and time windows for early positioning mattered. In the current cycle, the essay says, platform allocation matters more. The platform decides who wins. Insider information still exists, but the holder of that advantage has shifted from communities to companies, and from Eastern KOL circles to Western operating teams.
The article states the conclusion directly: the profitable on-chain addresses in this cycle are mainly Western.
It then widens the lens to a ten-year view. The author says on-chain leadership has swung repeatedly between East and West: the Chinese-led ICO boom in 2017, the Western-led DeFi Summer in 2021, and the Chinese-community-led meme bull market in 2024. Each shift matched a change in paradigm. ICOs paired Eastern capital with Western narratives. DeFi paired Western protocols with Eastern liquidity. Memes paired Eastern communities with Western tools.
Now, the pendulum has swung back again. This time, the essay says, the West is not leading through narrative or protocol design. It is leading through infrastructure.
An on-chain trading stack is taking shape
The essay says a clear process of infrastructure formation is underway and is already close to complete. In the author’s framework, Pump.fun handles issuance. Fomo handles accounts and social identity. Hyperliquid and trade.xyz handle derivatives. Put those pieces together, and you get an end-to-end on-chain trading stack: asset creation, user onboarding, spot trading, and leverage. At each layer, the article says, there is now a capital-backed Western company with operating scale.
What does that stack displace? The essay’s answer is the exchange structure that Eastern players dominated over the past decade. The author does not say centralized exchanges will disappear. The argument is narrower and more structural: future growth is moving on-chain, and the infrastructure for that growth is not in Eastern hands.
On this view, the moat of a centralized exchange lies in licensing, liquidity, and user habit. On-chain, those are no longer the same barriers. The new moats are the account system and network effects, and the article argues that Fomo has built both ahead of competitors.
That is why, in the essay’s reading, the old Chinese-language understanding of “smart money” is collapsing in this paradigm shift. It is not because those traders became less smart. It is because the market is no longer paying for the same kind of intelligence. Many participants are still looking for wallet addresses, still trying to build communities, still waiting for the next insider edge. The boat, the author writes, has already left.
Why the essay places Fomo above bots and wallets
The author does not reduce Fomo’s rise to capital alone. Capital is necessary, the piece says, but not sufficient. Fomo got three things right.
The first is the account system. Wallets from MetaMask to Phantom are built on seed phrases and addresses. That follows blockchain’s native logic, but it is also one of the biggest barriers to mass adoption. Addresses are unreadable and hard to remember. Cross-chain relationships are not intuitive. Lose a seed phrase, lose control. The article says Fomo maps addresses to email-based accounts, lets the same email generate the same address across devices, syncs across endpoints, and layers in gasless trading and frictionless cross-chain use. For the first time, in the author’s phrasing, a user can use an on-chain wallet in a way that feels more like WeChat.
The second is network effects. Trading is social, the essay says. Traders want to see other people’s positions, talk through trades, and test their own judgment. Fomo embeds follow relationships directly into the trading feed, so the positions and updates visible in spot and derivatives come from accounts the user already follows. That, the article argues, is the fundamental difference between Fomo and a standalone wallet.
The third is platform logic, the same distribution mechanism described earlier. The author compares Fomo to TikTok and Kuaishou in one specific sense: it controls traffic allocation. It can create KOLs, and it can cap them. Wallets and trading bots do not have that layer.
Stack those three layers together, and Fomo stops looking like a conventional crypto product. In the author’s framing, it becomes a mobile internet product. That, the article says, is what Benchmark and Index recognized.
From Sarnoff to Metcalfe to Reed
The essay spends substantial time on network effects because, in the author’s view, that is the precise layer separating Fomo from competitors. It revisits three familiar laws from communications theory. Sarnoff’s law says the value of a broadcast network scales roughly with audience size, N. Metcalfe’s law says the value of a communications network scales with N², because N users create N(N-1)/2 possible connections. Reed’s law goes further, arguing that networks that can form subgroups scale with 2^N because the number of possible groups grows exponentially.
The practical question underneath those formulas is simple: which products truly have network effects? The author’s answer is that products with user-to-user connections do. Add one user, and value rises for all existing users. That is an N² business. Products where users consume the function independently do not. Whether there is one user or one million, the experience for any single user barely changes. That is an N business.
The essay uses SMS and WeChat as the clearest contrast. On the surface, both send messages. But SMS is an N business, while WeChat is an N² business because relationships are stored inside it. Your friends are there. Leaving means losing the social graph. Similar function, different value structure. Telecom operators ran SMS for 20 years, the article says, while WeChat turned it into a tool for verification codes in just two years.
The on-chain parallel, in the author’s telling, is the gap between wallets and trading bots on one side, and Fomo on the other. Wallets and bots are compared to early mobile weather apps such as Moji Weather: useful, widely installed, and potentially huge in user count, yet still N businesses. One person’s use of a weather app does not make the product more valuable to another person. That means weak retention in user data and weak stickiness. If the operating system adds weather or a prettier app arrives, users can leave. The article says trading bots share that structure. They may be good tools with large audiences, but users are not connected to one another inside the product. Follow relationships, copy-trading history, and trading-based social ties do not settle there. A tool’s fate is to be replaced by a better tool.
Fomo may look similar at first glance. Users watch assets, buy assets, and watch what others buy. But the author says the crucial difference is that follow relationships accumulate there. The feed is built from the people you follow. Leaving Fomo means losing those relationships. The article adds that Fomo’s group chat and shared treasury functions push the product from a Metcalfe-style network toward a Reed-style one.
One more layer up, the essay recasts the platform as an “asset recommendation engine.” TikTok is fundamentally an information recommendation engine, the author writes. It decides which content reaches which viewer, so it can make influencers and erase them. Fomo does something similar with assets. It decides which instruments are seen by whom, and how widely a KOL’s holdings are distributed across feeds. The only difference is what gets recommended: content on TikTok, assets on Fomo. TikTok usually monetizes by taking a longer route through ads and commerce. Fomo monetizes the second the recommendation turns into a trade.
The author’s valuation call: at least a $100 billion company
Following that logic, the essay offers a rough estimate of Fomo’s possible scale. It says Fomo is already running at around $200 million in annualized revenue after less than two years in operation. For comparison, Robinhood took about seven years to reach $1 billion in annual revenue, while Coinbase took about six, according to the article.
The author argues that Fomo’s growth slope is steeper because it has network effects and Robinhood does not; Robinhood users are not connected to one another inside the product. If Fomo were valued on consumer finance platform sales multiples, the piece says, then a $10 billion valuation would sit in a reasonable range once annual revenue reaches $1 billion.
But the essay does not stop there. A mobile internet application with network effects, a recommendation engine, and an extremely short path to monetization should not cap out at that level, the author argues. It could grow to ByteDance scale. The article goes even further and says Fomo is not a Web3 version of ByteDance but, in the author’s words, a more “perfect” version. ByteDance has to build a bridge between content and transaction, first keeping users through content and then converting attention through ads and commerce, with friction in the middle. Fomo does not need that bridge if the recommendation target is itself tradable. On that basis, the author’s personal judgment is that Fomo’s future valuation could exceed ByteDance.
The essay acknowledges that the call sounds aggressive. It compares that skepticism to how people might have reacted in 2012 to the idea that WeChat could be worth more than telecom operators, or in 2016 to the idea that TikTok could outgrow traditional TV broadcasters.
The final thesis: platform logic is replacing the old on-chain method
The article closes by returning to its title and condensing the argument into three points.
- The “collapse of smart money” is not the failure of a few traders. It is the failure of an entire method. In the platform era, the author says, arbitrage built on information asymmetry is no longer the main source of profits.
- The “rise of the junket operator” is not a moral judgment. It is a description of platform logic. Once the platform controls distribution, a KOL stops being just an information source and becomes a channel.
- The “beginning of the Fomo dynasty” is not simply one company’s win. It marks the establishment of a new paradigm in which crypto becomes monetization infrastructure for a more efficient kind of mobile internet application.
The original article notes that it was submitted content and does not represent the view of BlockBeats.