What Watching Fomo’s Rise Taught Me About Vector

Reflections on product-market fit, finding a bigger market, and the future of social trading.

A couple of years ago, we built Vector, a mobile social trading app for onchain assets. We went from zero to a peak of over $20 million in daily volume very fast, with around $1 billion in all-time volume traded through the product. As growth accelerated from launch through the first few months, our retention looked more like a great social network than a trading app, which was exactly what we were trying to build.

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

Since then, I've been watching Fomo take a conceptually similar product in a different direction and execute exceptionally well. They've broken out of crypto Twitter, brought a large number of people onchain for the first time, and recently crossed more than $100 million in daily spot volume.

I don't look at their success and think, "that should have been us." I think what they've done is quite impressive. They took a product thesis we believed in deeply, focused it on a market we never really went after, and have realized the vision at a much larger scale than we did.

I've found the whole thing fascinating to watch, and I can't help thinking about the alternative path we might have gone down in some parallel universe.

Everything Interesting Starts as a Toy

Vector really started with Tensor.

Before I joined the company as VP Ops, I had angel invested in Tensor's first and only financing round, when it had almost no market share. By the time I joined, Tensor had become the dominant NFT marketplace on Solana. At its peak it had more than 80% market share and did billions of dollars in trading volume.

On something like my second day, Ilja came to me and basically said: we're not sure what happens with NFTs from here, but we think the next wave is memecoins, and we're going to build something for it.

The insight wasn't simply that memecoins were the next hot asset class. We thought the much bigger opportunity was social trading.

Trading had already become social. GameStop and WallStreetBets were obvious examples. More people were investing on their own, and increasingly the ideas they acted on came from people they trusted online rather than from a money manager or traditional financial institution.

Crypto made this behaviour even more visible. There were people on Twitter who were consistently early to important trades. Ansem is a good example. He was banging the drum on Solana when it was around $8. If you trusted his judgment and acted on it, you did extraordinarily well.

The problem was that discovery and execution lived in completely different worlds.

You'd see someone you trusted post about a coin on Twitter or in a Telegram group, decide whether you wanted in, and then find the right contract address. On mobile, actually executing was awful: open Phantom, open the browser, find Jupiter, connect your wallet, paste the contract address, verify the token, size the trade, and execute. In memecoins, minutes mattered. By the time you got in, the opportunity could already be gone.

We had a strong view that social signal and execution needed to live in the same product, and that the distance between the two needed to get as close to zero as possible.

Chris Dixon famously talks about how everything interesting starts out looking like a toy. That's how we thought about memecoins. They were the toy that could bootstrap a social trading network.

The long-term thesis was much bigger. As more serious assets moved onchain, that same network would naturally expand into them. If you owned the user, the social graph around trading and alpha, and an incredible execution experience, the hop from memecoins to stocks or other assets wasn't that large, particularly with the assumption that those assets themselves would increasingly come onchain.

Stocks obviously have businesses underneath them and memecoins generally don't. But increasingly, the way stocks actually trade can look surprisingly similar.

GameStop was an extreme early example, but this behaviour is increasingly normal. Look at the memory trade, the neocloud trade, or the hyperscaler trade. They're intensely social, narrative-driven, and momentum-driven. Leopold Aschenbrenner is a great recent example. He built enormous credibility around his view of where AI was going, and now investors closely follow and copy the positions he takes across names like Bloom Energy, CoreWeave, and Micron. His reputation and conviction become part of the information people use to evaluate and execute those trades.

Some of those theses will turn out to be fundamentally right and some won't. We'll know in hindsight. But the information layer around investing has clearly become social.

We believed the behaviour showing up in its purest form in memecoins wasn't unique to memecoins. It was an exaggerated version of where markets more broadly were already heading.

Learning What True PMF Feels Like

The easiest way to explain Vector is probably Instagram meets Robinhood. Instagram's core primitive was the photo. TikTok's is the video. For Vector, the chart was the photo.

You opened the app into a social feed. When someone shared a trade, you saw a live chart of the token, with the people who had traded it through Vector appearing directly on the chart where they bought or sold. The feed was algorithmic, surfacing the most important signal across the network. You could then execute a trade on that signal almost instantly. The goal was to compress the path from social signal to execution from minutes into seconds, and ideally milliseconds. A stark change from the broken status quo of trading on mobile.

One idea we pioneered was putting faces and trades directly on the chart. At the time, nobody was doing it. I remember seeing it internally and thinking, "Yeah, that's fucking genius." This is now a common UI pattern across trading apps, which is really cool to see.

The founders had a simple way of describing product-market fit: PMF is when people are pulling the product out of your hands faster than you can keep up. We knew Vector was working before we launched publicly because during the beta that was exactly what started happening. It was wild. Users were hounding us for more invite codes so they could bring their friends in.

We launched around the end of November 2024 and it immediately took off inside crypto Twitter. We got to around $1 million in daily volume very quickly, and by late January, around the Trump memecoin launch, we were peaking at over $20 million a day.

The retention was just as striking. I don't remember the exact numbers, but I believe D7 was around 60–70%, and D30 around 40–50%. People opened Vector constantly, traded, followed each other, shared theses, invited friends, and acted on the trades of people they followed.

We were a team of fewer than 25 people, and the pressure of that growth showed up everywhere: things breaking, trades occasionally not landing, support getting overwhelmed, and always more to build than we had people to build it. It was the most visceral lesson I've had in what real product-market fit feels like. Demand creates pressure everywhere. It pulls everything forward faster than the company can feasibly move.

It also reinforced something I believe very strongly about company building: small teams of exceptionally talented people can accomplish an unbelievable amount, and nothing is more important than staying extremely close to customers. Being customer-focused is cultural and must be demonstrated from the top. If you're not in the trenches talking to users, doing support, and understanding where the gaps are, it's very easy to lose touch with what the product actually needs.

Betting on the Pro Market

As the memecoin market cooled, a structural issue became clearer. Casual users would eventually lose enough of their bankroll that they traded less or left. Pro traders were different: they made money, kept trading, and did a ton of volume. The economics were extraordinarily concentrated. Roughly 5% of users were driving something like 95% of the volume.

So we made a rational choice: we decided to win the pro trader. Their needs were different. They sat behind multiple screens, watched many charts at once, and moved in and out of positions very quickly. Vector was an excellent mobile product and a lot of pros used it, but mobile was often a complement to their primary setup rather than where they did most of their volume. The market was also becoming intensely competitive. Axiom had built a fantastic product, with Photon, BullX, and others all fighting for the same user. We started building Vector for desktop because pros drove almost all of the volume and becoming their primary trading interface looked like the optimal path to win the market.

I still think that was a very credible strategy. The desktop product was excellent, early beta users loved it, and we had a go-to-market strategy we were highly confident in. But we never launched it publicly, so we never got to run that experiment.

In hindsight, there's another way I think about the choice we made. We were focused on winning an existing market rather than expanding the market itself. We spent much less time asking whether we could make the market dramatically bigger by bringing in people who had never traded onchain before.

That's the path Fomo ultimately went down.

What Fomo Got Right

What makes Fomo especially interesting to me is where they chose to focus. When we were building desktop, the obvious opportunity in the market was the pro trader. Axiom was exploding, pro traders drove the economics, and a growing number of products were competing aggressively to win them. That's where most of the industry's attention was going.

Fomo went the other way.

They went after people on TikTok, Instagram, and other channels outside crypto Twitter, many of whom had never traded onchain before. Instead of fighting over the same sophisticated traders, they focused on a huge consumer market that the rest of the industry was largely ignoring.

Timing mattered too. Fomo was building after the peak of the memecoin frenzy, in a market that was less manic and mercenary than the one we operated in. I don’t know if the same strategy would have worked as well at the peak, but they went after a different user at the right moment and executed exceptionally well.

They figured out how to reach users through channels outside the traditional crypto bubble, get them into the product, and drive their first-ever onchain trade. That's hard. It requires great distribution and a great product working together: making something as foreign as onchain trading feel accessible, converting those users, and giving them a reason to keep coming back.

Fomo nailed the nuances in the product experience that mattered to this audience. We couldn't have simply pointed Vector at these distribution channels and expected the same result without adapting the product around this user.

I don't think the lesson is that our decision to build for pro traders was wrong. I still think our desktop strategy could have been very successful. The more interesting lesson is that there was a much bigger market outside the one we were optimizing for. We didn't spend meaningful time exploring it. Fomo did, and they cracked it.

The market that gets you to product-market fit doesn't necessarily get you to massive scale.

Your first market can be exactly right as a beachhead and still represent only a fraction of the eventual opportunity. Once you've found something people really want, there is a separate question worth asking: where else does this product belong?

That is easy to say after the fact and much harder to see while you're operating. Your data is generated by the market you're already serving. It can tell you a lot about how to win that market, but much less about a user you've never acquired or a distribution channel you've never seriously tested.

For us, the data showed that the pro trader drove the economics of onchain memecoin trading. What it couldn't tell us was what would happen if you took a social trading product to a completely different group of people who had never traded onchain before.

Fomo has now run that experiment at scale.

Could Social Trading Be a $1T Opportunity?

The other thing Fomo has reinforced for me is that the original social trading thesis was not just directionally right, but the opportunity is becoming much larger, much faster than I think we anticipated.

We live in an increasingly financialized world. More people invest and trade for themselves. Markets are discussed in public. Ideas spread through social networks, people develop trust in individual traders, investors, and creators, and capital follows those networks of information and conviction.

Trading and investing are already definitively social.

That's true across asset classes. It's true in memecoins and crypto. It's true in prediction markets. It's increasingly obvious in equities.

I think that only accelerates from here. The world is more connected, information spreads faster, and AI is going to make the discovery and synthesis of information dramatically more powerful. At the same time, more and more assets are moving onchain. Stocks, prediction markets, options, RWAs, and eventually financial products we probably haven't conceived of yet are converging onto increasingly global, always-on financial infrastructure.

If you own a valuable social graph around trading and alpha and pair it with exceptional execution, that puts you in an incredibly interesting position. Memecoins can be the entry point, but the product doesn't have to end there. The asset class becomes almost modular as more of the financial world moves onchain.

That was always part of the Vector thesis, but watching Fomo grow has made the scale and timing of it much more concrete for me. People are ready to trade onchain, and they're ready for finance to be social. Fomo has shown that you can bring that experience to people far outside the existing crypto-native market.

I think they're very well positioned. They're already moving beyond memecoins with perps, and if they continue to execute, the opportunity gets much larger. The obvious analogy is Robinhood, but with a social graph and an onchain asset universe built into the product from the beginning.

Final Musings

Could Vector have become a multi-billion-dollar company if we had continued?

I think it's entirely possible. Maybe even bigger than that. We had an amazing product, an incredibly talented team, and a strategy that I think could have been very successful. Perhaps from there we would eventually have gone after the broader consumer market. Perhaps Fomo still would have beaten us. Perhaps we'd be bigger than Fomo is today. Maybe one day quantum lets us run the simulation in a parallel universe.

What is interesting to me now is getting to watch another great team explore a path we never did. I'm enjoying the show from the bleachers. They found a market we never really went after and have taken social trading much further than we did. I have a tremendous amount of respect for what they've built.

More than anything, watching it happen has reinforced something I now think is definitive: financial markets are already deeply social and will only become more so, while more of the world’s assets move onchain.

We got to build an early version of what that future might look like with Vector.

Fomo is showing how much bigger it can get.

Thanks to @0xrwu, @ilmoi, @SimkinStepan, @kankanivishal, @MelJL, @GarrettHarper_, and @brian_smith_0 for their feedback on earlier drafts.