Not selling to Coinbase, perhaps we can do bigger than Fomo

Author: Phil Jacobson, former executive at Vector, Chief Business Officer at Altitude

Compiled by: Jiahua, ChainCatcher

A few years ago, we built Vector, a mobile social trading application for on-chain assets. The product started from scratch, and the daily trading volume quickly surpassed $20 million, with a cumulative trading volume of about $1 billion. In the first few months after launch, as the user base grew rapidly, Vector's retention performance was closer to that of an excellent social application rather than a trading application. This was exactly the product we wanted to create.

At the end of 2025, we sold the company to Coinbase.

Since then, I have been following Fomo. It continues with a product concept similar to Vector but has taken a different path and executed it exceptionally well. Fomo has broken through the crypto Twitter circle, attracting a large number of users to enter the on-chain market for the first time, with recent daily spot trading volume exceeding $100 million.

Seeing Fomo's success, I do not feel "this should have been us." On the contrary, I think their achievements are remarkable. They have taken over a product concept we firmly believed in, targeting a market we had never truly explored, and ultimately achieved a scale far beyond Vector.

The whole process fascinates me and makes me ponder: in some parallel world, if we had chosen a different path, where would Vector have ended up?

All interesting things initially look like toys

The story of Vector actually began with Tensor.

Before joining the company as the Vice President of Operations, I participated as an angel investor in Tensor's first and only round of financing. At that time, Tensor had almost no market share. By the time I officially joined, it had become the dominant NFT trading market on Solana, with peak market share exceeding 80% and cumulative trading volume reaching billions of dollars.

On about my second day at work, Ilja approached me and said directly, "We don't know what will happen with NFTs next, but we believe the next wave will be Meme coins, and we want to create a product around it."

What we saw was not just "Meme coins will become the next hot asset class," but a bigger opportunity in social trading.

Trading had already become social. GameStop and WallStreetBets are the most obvious examples. More and more people began to invest independently, relying more on trusted individuals online when making investment decisions, rather than asset managers or traditional financial institutions.

The crypto market made this behavior even more pronounced. There are always people on Twitter who can capture important trading opportunities ahead of others; Ansem is a great example. When Solana was still around $8, he was heavily promoting it. If you trusted his judgment and took action, you could achieve significant returns.

The problem is that discovering opportunities and executing trades are disconnected.

You might see someone you trust discussing a certain token on Twitter or in a Telegram group, decide whether to participate, and then look for the correct contract address. Completing a trade on your phone is especially troublesome: open Phantom, then open a browser, find Jupiter, connect your wallet, paste the contract address, verify the token, enter the trade amount, and finally execute the trade.

For Meme coins, a few minutes of delay can be crucial. By the time you actually complete the trade, the opportunity may have already vanished.

We have a very firm judgment on this: social signals and trade execution must be integrated into the same product, and the path from seeing a signal to completing a trade must be shortened as much as possible, ideally to a single step.

Chris Dixon has a well-known saying: all interesting things initially look like toys. We viewed Meme coins in the same way. Meme coins are the "toys" that help the social trading network achieve a cold start.

But our long-term vision goes far beyond that. As more important assets move on-chain, the same social trading network can naturally extend to these assets. If a product can retain users, build a social network around trading and Alpha, and provide an excellent trading experience, then expanding from Meme coins to stocks or other assets is not difficult, especially as more assets themselves will also go on-chain.

Stocks are backed by actual operating companies, while Meme coins usually are not. But from the trading logic in the market, the two are becoming increasingly similar.

GameStop is an extreme and early example, but this behavior is gradually becoming the norm. Look at investment themes like memory, new cloud service providers, or hyperscale cloud vendors; they all heavily rely on social dissemination, market narratives, and price momentum.

Leopold Aschenbrenner is a recent typical case. He has built strong market appeal based on his judgment of AI development directions, and investors closely follow his investments in companies like Bloom Energy, CoreWeave, and Micron. His reputation and firm stance have become information that investors reference when making judgments and placing orders.

Some of these investment logics will ultimately be proven correct, and some will not; only time will tell. But the information that investment decisions rely on is increasingly coming from social networks.

We believe that these behaviors in the Meme coin market are not unique to Meme coins. Meme coins have merely amplified a trading behavior that is spreading to a broader market.

What does true PMF feel like?

The simplest way to explain Vector is probably "a combination of Instagram and Robinhood." The core content of Instagram is photos, TikTok's core content is videos, and in Vector, charts are the photos.

When you open Vector, the first thing you see is a social information feed. When someone shares a trade, users see the real-time chart of that token; those who have traded that token on Vector appear as avatars directly at their respective buy or sell positions.

The algorithm filters out the most important signals from the entire network and pushes them into the information feed. After seeing a signal, users can almost immediately complete a trade. Our goal is to compress the process from social signal to executing a trade from minutes to seconds, ideally even down to milliseconds. This stands in stark contrast to the fragmented mobile trading experience at the time.

One design we pioneered was placing user avatars and trades directly on the price chart. At that time, no other product did this. I remember the first time I saw it internally, my immediate reaction was, "This is simply genius design." Today, this has become a common interaction method adopted by many trading applications, and it’s interesting to see this.

The founders described product-market fit (PMF) in a very simple way: PMF occurs when users are grabbing the product from you so quickly that the team can't keep up.

Before officially launching, we already knew Vector had found its direction because this situation occurred during the testing phase. Users kept chasing us for more invitation codes to invite friends to join, and the scene was even a bit crazy.

Vector launched around the end of November 2024 and quickly became popular in the crypto Twitter circle. Daily trading volume soon reached about $1 million; by late January of the following year, around the time of the Trump Meme coin launch, daily trading volume peaked at over $20 million.

User retention was equally impressive. Although I don't remember the exact numbers, I recall that the 7-day retention rate was about 60% to 70%, and the 30-day retention rate was about 40% to 50%. Users frequently opened Vector to trade, follow each other, share investment logic, invite friends, and trade based on whom they followed.

At that time, our team had fewer than 25 people, and the pressure from rapid growth manifested at every level: system failures, trades occasionally failing to execute, customer service being overwhelmed, and an endless stream of product demands.

This was my most direct experience that truly helped me understand what PMF feels like. Real demand simultaneously squeezes products, trading, customer service, and development, forcing every aspect of the company to accelerate, sometimes even faster than the team can keep up.

This experience also further reinforced my judgment about entrepreneurship: a small but highly talented team can achieve results far beyond its size. At the same time, nothing is more important than staying close to users.

Being customer-centric must become a top-down corporate culture. If the team does not personally communicate with users, handle customer service issues, and understand product gaps, it is easy to become disconnected from the real problems that the product needs to solve.

Betting on the professional trader market

As the Meme coin market cooled down, a structural problem gradually emerged. Ordinary users tend to reduce trading or even leave after accumulating a certain level of losses; professional traders, on the other hand, can profit, continue trading, and contribute a significant amount of trading volume.

Vector's trading volume is highly concentrated, with about 5% of users contributing approximately 95% of the trading volume.

Therefore, we made a rational choice: to capture the professional trader market.

The needs of professional traders differ from those of ordinary users. They typically sit in front of multiple screens, simultaneously observing a large number of charts, and quickly enter and exit different positions. Vector is an excellent mobile product, and many professional traders use it, but for them, the phone is usually just a supplement to their primary trading device, not the place where most trades are completed.

Market competition has also become exceptionally fierce. Axiom has created a very excellent product, and platforms like Photon and BullX are also vying for the same group of users. Since professional traders contribute the vast majority of trading volume, we began developing a desktop version of Vector, hoping to make it the primary trading interface for these users. At that time, this seemed to be the best path to winning the market.

To this day, I still believe this strategy is completely sound. Vector's desktop product is outstanding, and early testing users loved it; we were also very confident in our marketing strategy. However, it ultimately did not launch officially, so we could not validate this route.

Looking back, I have a different understanding of the choice made at that time: we focused on how to compete for existing users rather than how to expand the entire market. We rarely seriously considered whether we could attract people who had never participated in on-chain trading to significantly enlarge the market.

Fomo ultimately chose this path.

What Fomo did right

What interests me most about Fomo is the type of users it chose to serve.

When we were developing the desktop version, professional traders were the most certain opportunity in the market. Axiom was rapidly growing, professional traders were supporting most of the platform's trading volume, and more and more products were fiercely competing for them. Most of the industry's attention was focused on this market.

Fomo, however, chose the opposite direction.

They targeted channels outside of crypto Twitter, such as TikTok and Instagram, aimed at a large number of users who had never participated in on-chain trading. Fomo did not continue to compete for the same mature traders but instead aimed at a large consumer market that was largely overlooked by the industry.

Timing was also crucial. When Fomo began to develop, the peak of the Meme coin craze had already passed, and the market was not as frenzied as it was during Vector's time; the atmosphere of short-term profit-seeking had also weakened. I do not know if the same strategy would have achieved the same effect during the market peak, but Fomo chose different users at the right time and executed it exceptionally well.

They found a way to reach users through channels outside the traditional crypto circle, bringing these people into the product and encouraging them to complete their first on-chain transaction.

This is not easy and requires excellent distribution capabilities and a great product to work together: making unfamiliar on-chain trading easy to understand while ensuring users genuinely start using the product and are willing to return repeatedly.

Fomo also accurately grasped the product details that this group of users truly cared about. We could not just take Vector to promote through these channels and expect to achieve the same results. To serve this group of users, the product must also be redesigned for them.

The lesson here is not that our choice to serve professional traders was wrong. I still believe that Vector's desktop strategy could have been very successful. What is more noteworthy is that beyond the continuously optimized existing market, there exists a much larger market. We never invested enough time to explore it, while Fomo truly ran this path successfully.

The users who help the product find PMF may not necessarily be the ones to push it to a larger scale.

The initial market can certainly serve as the right entry point but may only account for a small part of the final opportunity. After finding the product that people truly want, another question must be answered: what new users can this product serve, and which new markets can it enter?

It is easy to say this in hindsight, but it is difficult to see when you are on the front lines of company operations. The data you have all comes from the market you are serving; it can tell you how to win in the existing market but struggles to answer two questions: will the users you have not reached buy in, and can new channels that have never been tried bring new growth?

For us, the data only indicated that professional traders supported most of the trading volume in the on-chain Meme coin market. But it could not tell us: what would happen if we brought a social trading product to a group of people who had never engaged in on-chain trading?

Today, Fomo has validated this route with scalable growth.

Will social trading be a trillion-dollar opportunity?

Fomo has also made me more convinced that our initial direction regarding social trading was not wrong, and that this opportunity is expanding at a pace far beyond expectations.

We live in a world where financialization is continuously increasing. More and more people are independently investing and trading, and the market is widely discussed in public spaces. Investment opinions are spread through social networks, and people begin to trust certain traders, investors, and content creators, with funds flowing along these information networks and group beliefs.

Trading and investing have long had distinct social attributes.

This phenomenon spans different asset classes. It exists in Meme coins and crypto assets, in prediction markets, and is becoming increasingly evident in the stock market.

In the future, this trend will only continue to accelerate. The world is becoming more interconnected, information spreads faster, and AI will significantly enhance people's ability to discover and integrate information. Meanwhile, more and more assets are moving on-chain.

Stocks, prediction markets, options, RWAs, and financial products we may not yet have imagined are gradually migrating to a more globalized, around-the-clock financial infrastructure.

If a product can master the high-value social networks formed around trading and Alpha, combined with an excellent trading execution experience, it has the opportunity to occupy a key entry point for on-chain trading.

Meme coins can serve as an entry point, but the product does not have to stop there. As more financial assets move on-chain, products can continuously connect to new asset classes like adding modules.

This has always been part of Vector's product vision, but observing Fomo's growth has made me see more clearly how large and fast this opportunity can be. Users are already willing to trade on-chain and accept financial products with social attributes. Fomo has proven that this experience can reach a vast audience beyond the crypto-native market.

I believe Fomo is in a very advantageous position. They are moving out of the Meme coin market through perpetual contracts. If the team continues to maintain its execution capabilities, the growth potential will further expand.

The most direct analogy is Robinhood, but Fomo has integrated social networks into the product from the very beginning and connected to the on-chain asset system.

Final Thoughts

If Vector had continued to develop independently at that time, could it have become a company worth billions of dollars?

I believe it is entirely possible, and it might even reach a larger scale. We had an excellent product, a highly talented team, and a strategy that was likely to succeed. Perhaps we would eventually pivot to a broader consumer market; perhaps Fomo would still defeat us; or perhaps Vector would be larger than Fomo today.

Maybe one day, quantum technology will really allow us to run this simulation in a parallel world.

What truly interests me now is being able to watch another excellent team explore a path we have never taken. I enjoy sitting in the stands observing this process. They have discovered a market we have never truly attempted to enter and have scaled social trading far beyond Vector. I have great respect for the product they have built.

More importantly, witnessing all of this has completely convinced me: the financial market has become deeply socialized and will only become more so; at the same time, an increasing number of assets around the world will also move on-chain.

Vector allowed us to get an early glimpse of this future.

Fomo is demonstrating just how large this future can be.