fomo Co-founder Se Yong: Opportunity Cost of Not Being on the Financial Social Graph is Rising
Se Yong, co-founder of fomo, stated that the opportunity cost of not being on the financial social graph has just increased.
Se Yong positions fomo as a financial social graph, transforming trading into scrollable, followable, and discussable social content, including real-time profit and loss information streams, leaderboards, follow notifications, public positions, historical records, and buy/sell points overlaid on charts.
The platform has surpassed 1.3 million users within 18 months, recently adding about 30,000 users daily, with this week's transaction fee revenue exceeding $2 million and a latest valuation of $550 million, emphasizing that it has never paid to attract traders and has achieved organic growth.
All three co-founders come from dYdX, with Se Yong previously studying economics at Yale before joining dYdX. The team views trading as an inherent social behavior, aiming to reach ordinary people globally rather than just crypto terminal users.
Some top traders have accumulated over 100,000 followers, and the platform is turning traders into a new generation of internet celebrities through public P&L and leaderboards.
From a market mechanism perspective, users act as buyers by following and copying trades to absorb liquidity, driven by social network effects. Funds are flowing from traditional trading terminals to social trading platforms that have identity and reputation accumulation, benefiting early core users and the platform, while traders not connected to this graph face higher costs of missing information and opportunities.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Se Yong, along with co-founders Paul Erlanger and Prashan Dharmasena, all come from the early team of dYdX, where they observed on-chain trader behavior for a long time. After leaving, they created fomo, transforming past perpetual contract experience into a social trading interface for the masses. His personal experience of missing out on million-level Base meme coin trades directly inspired the product concept of reducing friction.
In terms of capital, fomo has raised nearly $100 million through Series B financing of $75 million, investing resources into social features and cross-chain execution, motivated by turning trading itself into viral content to acquire long-tail users at low cost, with funds flowing back from venture capital and transaction fee revenue to user growth and social graph expansion.
A similar path can be seen in early social media turning content creators into celebrities, and platforms like Robinhood retailing trading; currently, fomo is transitioning from a crypto-native tool to a mainstream financial social network, with public leaderboards and copy-trading mechanisms accelerating the monetization of trader identities.
Structurally, this represents a reconstruction of the industry chain: trading shifts from isolated terminal behavior to social graph nodes, with mechanisms forming new trust and discovery layers through publicly visible P&L and follow relationships, making opportunity costs shift from merely missing prices to missing the entire social network and identity accumulation.
ABAB News · Law of Cognition
If you're not in the graph, opportunity costs will only rise unilaterally.
The day traders become celebrities, social becomes financial.
Once an organic network is formed, paid traffic acquisition becomes a joke.