Fomo has carved out a rare growth story in a bear market, rising into the ranks of crypto’s leading fee-generating products while turning a social trading app into a new onchain trading gateway. Built by a team of about 17 people, the company has raised a cumulative $94 million in a little over a year and has now become a direct competitor to Pump.fun in parts of the Solana ecosystem.
Dune data cited by PANews shows that as of Aug. 12, Fomo had recorded about 28.644 million cumulative trades, more than $4.69 billion in total trading volume, and over $31.79 million in cumulative fees.
Trading activity accelerated within weeks
By timeline, Fomo’s inflection point came near the end of the second quarter of 2026, with the breakout happening in just a few weeks. Before that, weekly trading volume had mostly stayed in the range of several million to several tens of millions of dollars. After July began, volume expanded sharply and quickly moved into the hundreds of millions. In the latest trading week, Fomo’s weekly volume climbed past $550 million, setting another all-time high.
The surge did not come from a single chain alone. Before May 2026, Solana accounted for nearly all of Fomo’s trading volume. After that, the platform expanded activity to Base, BNB Chain, and Ethereum, though those networks contributed only limited incremental volume to the overall total.
The main growth driver was the launch of Robinhood Chain mainnet, which brought in a large wave of new trading flow. Fomo co-founder Se Yong Park said, 「On Robinhood Chain, one out of every two active wallets comes from Fomo.」 In the latest week alone, Robinhood Chain contributed about 32.4% of total volume, and at one point that share reached 64.8%.
Fomo’s traffic advantage is even more visible inside the Robinhood Chain ecosystem. Dune data cited by PANews shows that as of Aug. 11, Fomo accounted for 35% of trading volume across Robinhood Chain trading bots. It was also the platform with the highest number of daily active wallets, with its daily active wallets making up more than 92.9% of the chain’s overall total. In practical terms, Robinhood Chain brought Fomo a new pool of incremental users, and Fomo quickly became a core trading entry point on that network.
More recently, however, Solana regained the lead as Fomo’s biggest traffic source, contributing about 51.2% of the latest volume. Within Solana, Fomo has also grown into the largest competitor to Meme launchpad Pump.fun. PANews said the rivalry has become more direct in recent weeks: Pump.fun was reported to have tried to win over Fomo users with high-priced offers, sought to lock in traffic through exclusive agreements, and rolled out social trading features similar to Fomo’s.
That shift suggests Fomo is no longer just a trading utility. It is becoming a competitive onchain trading gateway in its own right.
User growth and fees climbed together
Volume was not the only metric moving higher. Fomo’s user growth also accelerated quickly, with the number of weekly traders increasing 10x over the past few months. Dune data shows that before July this year, daily active traders on Fomo had stayed in the low thousands for a long period, with relatively slow growth. After Robinhood Chain mainnet went live, user activity entered a breakout phase, lifting daily active traders into the tens of thousands. The single-day peak came close to 48,000.
As onchain activity increased, total fees rose in step. Before the second quarter of 2026, Fomo’s weekly fees were mostly in the range of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. As trading volume expanded in July, weekly fee revenue quickly moved into the millions. In the latest trading week, the platform generated about $3.17 million in fees.
Fomo recently broke into the top 10 in protocol revenue across the market for a period, with revenue above that of Hyperliquid, Axiom Pro, and Pump.fun, according to PANews. The report’s reading of the data is that Fomo benefited from two conditions at once: the cold-start traffic brought by Robinhood Chain mainnet and the persistent high-frequency trading demand from Solana’s mature Meme ecosystem.
$94 million raised in a little over a year, with a team of about 17
In a weak market, hard metrics tend to say more about product-market fit than narrative alone. Fomo has moved against the broader slowdown in crypto, raising large rounds, climbing in valuation, and posting parallel growth in users and product scope.
In June this year, Fomo closed a $75 million Series B led by Index Ventures. Participants included Union Square Ventures, Benchmark, Zynga co-founder Mark Pincus, Discord CEO Humam Sakhnini, and Eventbrite co-founder Kevin Hartz. The round valued the company at $550 million.
For a crypto consumer startup founded only a little over a year ago, that financing scale stands out on its own. PANews argued that the more important question is why Fomo managed to expand in a bear market.
One answer lies in the team and how it executes. Co-founders Paul Erlanger, Se Yong Park, and Prashan Dharmasena all came from dYdX, described in the report as an early perpetual DEX. Their background gave them direct familiarity with onchain trading products and long-term exposure to trader behavior, while also combining product, growth, and engineering skill sets.
Another factor is capital efficiency. Fomo’s team is still only about 17 people. During the first eight months after the company was founded, core team members took almost no salary, while non-founder engineers were offered 2% to 3% equity packages that would more often be reserved for founding teams. Before the product had been fully validated, Fomo did not lean on heavy spending to force growth. It relied on a small team, low operating cost, and incentives tied closely to value creation.
Hiding blockchain complexity from the user
The founders’ experience at dYdX also shaped the product thesis. In their view, onchain assets and trading opportunities have kept expanding, but user experience remains stuck in a crypto-native era. Historically, users needed to manage wallets, private keys, and seed phrases, while also dealing with bridges, gas fees, and fragmented liquidity across multiple chains. Crypto-native users may learn those tools. Mainstream consumers often see them as barriers.
Fomo’s response was not to build a product that asks users to learn more about blockchain. It tried to move as much of that complexity into the background as possible and make trading feel closer to a normal consumer app.
Users can sign up directly with Google or Apple ID, without a seed phrase, and without paying gas. The platform also supports funding through Apple Pay, debit cards, or crypto. In interviews, Se Yong said the platform deliberately avoided using assets such as SOL or ETH as the account denomination, choosing instead to display balances in U.S. dollars. 「If an ordinary person sees $100 turn into $98.52 because the underlying token price moved, they may simply think the platform stole their money.」 In his view, once users start doubting the safety of their funds, trust is hard to rebuild.
That de-crypto design appears to have brought in users from outside the existing market. Data disclosed in June 2026 showed that more than 68,000 users had completed their first crypto purchase through Apple Pay. Index Ventures partner Julia Andre said the firm did not invest in Fomo because it was a crypto company, but because 「onchain trading is just too hard.」
Turning trading into social content
Lowering the entry barrier only solves the first problem: how users get in. For a consumer product, the harder question is why people stay and why they choose to share it. Fomo’s answer was to turn trading itself into a form of social content.
The team believes trading is fundamentally social behavior, while existing communities and signal sources are fragmented and uneven in quality. In a recent interview, Se Yong said Fomo’s core vision is to become a social graph for finance, meaning the product has to be seamless, social, and fun.
Inside the app, Fomo turns what is usually a dry trading workflow into content users can scroll, follow, and discuss. A real-time feed shows other users’ buys, sells, and profit-and-loss outcomes. Leaderboards rank top traders by period. Users can follow accounts and receive live notifications. Profile pages display positions and history transparently. Charts overlay entry and exit points so users can inspect trading logic directly.
When trading becomes inherently shareable content, it can generate FOMO emotion and user-driven distribution. That gives the product a lower-cost path to new users, especially beginners.
Fundraising as a cold-start distribution strategy
For consumer apps, one of the hardest stages is cold start. Fomo concluded that relying only on ads or traditional channels could be expensive before network effects took hold. The company therefore made community fundraising part of its cold-start plan.
Paul Erlanger said clearly that the team wanted financing to 「solve the cold-start problem and create distribution channels.」 In its first financing round, Fomo put together a 「dream investor list」 of about 200 people. Drawing on relationships built at dYdX, it ultimately brought in more than 140 angel investors and raised $2 million.
Those investors were not just capital providers. The group included founders and executives of top protocols, well-known venture investors, professional traders, market makers, and industry operators. For Fomo, they were also potential users and part of a distribution network.
In its $17 million Series A, Fomo kept using the same approach. Benchmark was the only institutional investor in that round, while the rest of the capital came from existing and newly added angels. For a consumer product that needs network effects quickly, an investor who understands the product, uses it, and actively shares it can be more valuable than simply adding one more check.
Meme demand helped, but the product scope is broader
PANews also pointed to a practical market reason behind Fomo’s growth. While most crypto assets saw lower attention and weaker trading appetite, Meme coins stayed relatively active and highly shareable. Those assets depend heavily on attention, social consensus, and immediate emotion, making them a natural fit for Fomo’s social discovery model.
At the same time, Fomo’s ambitions go beyond that segment. The product has already expanded into perpetuals, and it plans to cover stocks, derivatives, prediction markets, and other asset classes.
The breakout did not happen instantly
The current growth run was not immediate. After the first financing round, Fomo went through several quiet months and struggled to push its user base above 140. Se Yong said the turning point came from a group of early users who used the product almost every day and kept sending feedback that helped the team iterate.
That process pushed the company toward a different lesson: rather than rushing to chase user scale, it made more sense to serve a small set of early users well and listen closely to what they actually needed.
Whether this high-speed growth can continue, and whether Fomo can convert short-term traffic into long-term users and stable revenue, still needs time to prove out.