fomo Co-founder Paul: Social Trading is a Brand New Category
Paul Erlanger, co-founder and CEO of the crypto social trading platform fomo, stated during the podcast Maurits Markets that fomo has recognized since its inception that trading behavior will inevitably become social.
Erlanger mentioned that the social features are not intended to create "an on-chain version of Twitter," but to help users become better traders; in his view, previously users had to actively ask others what they bought, but now they can simply click on the other person's holdings page to directly see their trading thoughts and specific positions.
Erlanger believes that fomo is actually creating a brand new product category called "social trading" from scratch, with its core differentiation being the establishment of a "social graph" that spans different asset classes, allowing users to follow their friends' holdings in real-time and express their trading views across various asset types, including stocks, perpetual contracts, and prediction markets.
According to reports, fomo's future plans are not limited to cryptocurrency trading but will further enter traditional asset markets like stocks, aiming to become the "social graph" of the entire financial world.
Public information shows that fomo was co-founded by Erlanger, Se Yong Park, and Prashan Dharmasena in 2025, all of whom previously worked at the decentralized exchange dYdX; the company completed a $75 million Series B funding round led by Index Ventures in June this year, with a valuation of $550 million. Investors in this round also included USV, Zynga co-founder Mark Pincus, and Discord CEO Humam Sakhnini. The previous Series A funding was led by Benchmark, raising $17 million. Currently, the fomo platform adds about 3,500 new users daily, with a team size of only 17 people.
Erlanger has previously stated in other public forums that the "super app" model, like Robinhood and Revolut, which attempts to "one-stop meet all user financial needs," lacks a clear intention, while fomo's chosen path focuses on the social connections within trading scenarios as a differentiated positioning, rather than pursuing a broad and comprehensive approach.
Source: Public Information
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All three founders of fomo come from the decentralized derivatives exchange dYdX, which shapes their understanding of "trading infrastructure" starting from on-chain perpetual contracts rather than traditional securities brokerage; this contrasts with Robinhood's path of starting from retail stock brokerage and gradually expanding into cryptocurrency. fomo has chosen the reverse path of "starting from crypto-native trading tools and then expanding into traditional asset classes," which is also a strategy attempted by many crypto trading applications in recent years.
Since its establishment in 2025, fomo's valuation has surged to $550 million within less than a year after completing its Series B funding in June this year, with the lead investor changing from Benchmark to Index Ventures, attracting USV, and receiving personal investments from founders and executives of consumer internet companies like Zynga and Discord. This combination of investors generally possesses experience in "social products + viral growth," and the core logic of capital betting is that if fomo can successfully integrate the "social graph" into the trading scenario, it has the potential to replicate the exponential user growth curve of social products, rather than relying solely on linear growth from trading commissions and asset scale.
This aligns with eToro's early introduction of the "copy trading" mechanism in traditional forex and CFD trading, as well as Robinhood's indirect influence on retail trading behavior through community discussion heat; the difference is that fomo aims to take it a step further by making the ability to "see others' specific positions and trading thoughts" the core of the product, rather than an additional feature of copy trading. The current social trading track is in the early stages of evolving from basic social functions like "copy trading/showing trades" to a more advanced form of "real-time social graph spanning multiple asset classes."
Essentially, this represents a "reconstruction of the industry chain"—at the mechanism level, the user stickiness of traditional trading platforms mainly relies on factors like asset variety, trading fees, and execution speed, while fomo attempts to shift the source of stickiness from "trading infrastructure itself" to "social relationship chains." Once users establish their social graph and following relationships within a trading application, their switching costs will be significantly higher than merely changing a trading account; this is why Erlanger clearly stated that he does not pursue a "super app" approach that is broad and comprehensive, but rather prioritizes solidifying the social graph, which is relatively difficult for competitors to replicate, before gradually expanding horizontally into new asset classes like stocks.
ABAB News · Law of Cognition
What can be replicated is functionality; what cannot be replicated is the relationship chain.
Once the social graph is established, even if the exchange changes, the friend circle cannot be replaced.
Broad and comprehensive competition is for traffic; focused and deep competition is for switching costs.