Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Author | Golem (@web3_golem)
The current Meme market is severely fragmented. Whether it's the blockchain ecosystem or the trading tools used, there is almost no intersection between overseas users and the Chinese-speaking community. This fragmentation not only diverts global Meme funds into various ecosystems but also makes "industry gossip" confusing to understand.
On August 8th, a piece of gossip about "Pump.fun spending huge sums to poach users from a competitor" went viral in overseas Meme communities.
Originally leaked by an overseas user CLR, it stated that Pump.fun is using an incentive program to lure users away from the FOMO platform to Pump.fun. According to the disclosed agreement document, Pump.fun plans to offer eligible users a one-time $20,000 signing bonus and a fixed monthly payment of $30,000. The agreement requires signed users to migrate their funds and trading positions from the FOMO platform to Pump.fun; use a new, previously unused by other platforms, wallet as their exclusive wallet; bind their X account to the Pump.fun wallet; publicly declare on their X profile that this wallet is their only public wallet; and permanently delete and close their FOMO platform account.
Additionally, users must meet real trading requirements, including completing at least $25,000 in monthly trading volume on Pump.fun (or 25% of their previous average monthly trading volume on the FOMO platform). It's clear that Pump.fun is determined to go all out to snatch users from the FOMO platform.
Translated Full Content of the Agreement (Source: 0xAA)
From a business perspective, this is a normal act of corporate competition and is perfectly legal. In entertainment platforms or user-centric business models, companies often pay KOLs or users with significant fan influence to leave competitor platforms and maintain exclusive representation on their own platform. This competition model is quite common domestically as well, such as the exorbitant exclusive contracts for internet celebrities and streamers by early short-video live-streaming platforms like Douyin, Kuaishou, Bilibili, and Huya.
But the first thing that confused onlookers about this entire incident was: Who is FOMO?
Pump.fun is the largest token launch platform overseas, consistently ranking among the top five on-chain protocols in terms of fee revenue. What reason would lead it to poach users from the FOMO platform? What kind of magic does the FOMO platform possess to become a commercial rival that makes Pump.fun nervous? Odaily Planet Daily will analyze the undercurrents and massive changes in the current overseas Meme market through this "gossip."
FOMO Has Become a Major Meme Trading Platform for Users
FOMO is a multi-chain Meme trading platform, with business and services similar to GMGN. The platform launched in May 2025 and has been in formal operation for just over a year. However, according to RootData, FOMO has completed 3 rounds of financing, raising a total of $94 million, with a valuation exceeding $550 million.
FOMO primarily serves overseas Meme communities and focuses on promoting mobile trading. Most users in the Chinese-speaking community may not have even heard of FOMO. What's even more shocking is that this platform you may never have heard of or used has already surpassed Uniswap and Phantom in revenue over the past 30 days, and its Trading Bot market share has surpassed GMGN to become number one in the market.
According to DeFiLlama data, FOMO's revenue over the past 30 days is $8.17 million. While still less than GMGN and Axiom, it has already surpassed Phantom, Uniswap, and mainstream Launchpads on Robinhood (Flap and Pons).
Meanwhile, according to Dune data, as of the time of writing, the FOMO platform's total fees have reached $30.39 million. As shown in the chart below, looking at daily fees, the FOMO platform began experiencing rapid growth starting in July, with average daily fees exceeding $200,000, having previously maintained an average of around $10,000. As of the time of writing, the FOMO platform set a new daily fee record on August 6th, reaching $556,000.
Entering August, the FOMO platform continued its high growth. As of August 8th, the FOMO platform's market share in Trading Bots has risen to 43%, surpassing GMGN to become the market leader, a position GMGN had consistently held.
How influential is FOMO now? A recent example will make it clear. On August 4th, the Solana Meme coin CATE experienced a flash crash of 65% within a minute, its market cap dropping from over $80 million to around $20 million. The community summarized two reasons: first, CATE's X account was suspended; second, FOMO went down, preventing users from trading during the outage. Of course, this incident is still controversial; interested readers can delve deeper. (Related reading:$CATE Flash Crashes 65% in One Minute, FOMO Platform's "Coincidental" Outage Raises Rug Pull Suspicions Again)
Regardless of the truth, this incident is enough to demonstrate the current influence of the FOMO platform in the Meme ecosystem. So, from a product perspective, what sets FOMO apart from numerous competitors?
The answer lies in FOMO's product design. The core services FOMO provides are similar to most Meme trading platforms, but its slogan is "the only social-first trading app." This is embodied in the product through the introduction of a profit Leaderboard and a Feed providing real-time alerts on top traders' activities.
LEADERBOARD and FEED on the FOMO platform
The Meme market inherently worships financial success – those who make enough money are considered "smart money" and gain a large following of fans and copy traders. The FOMO platform leverages this group characteristic by artificially "creating stars", using pages like the Leaderboard to deliberately push high-profit users to the forefront, helping them gain influence. On August 9th, FOMO team member @villagebythexyz posted on X, stating that compared to previous cycles, anyone with any influence in the cryptocurrency space now must be a good trader, emphasizing that "it's trading that builds your following, not your following that builds your trades."
This model has been a huge success. For example, the reason the Solana Meme coin CATE surged was not due to its compelling narrative, but rather the traffic and open support from the so-called "Little Ansem," Poorgoat. Poorgoat is a member of the FOMO Hall of Fame (a list of users recognized by FOMO for achieving substantial profits on the platform). Therefore, with the support of fans, even though CATE lacked a compelling narrative, it was still able to create a "myth."
Pump.fun recognized the immense potential of this model for platform growth. So, on August 7th, the Pump.fun APP announced a social feature upgrade. The core of the upgrade was replicating FOMO's social features. Now, entering the Pump.fun homepage, users no longer see an overwhelming stream of new Meme coin information, but rather a feed of Meme traders/KOLs and push notifications monitoring their operations.
Pump.fun Homepage
Pump.fun founder, alon, has recently been posting frequently to welcome various overseas Meme traders/KOLs to join the Pump.fun app. To attract more renowned overseas Meme traders to the Pump.fun platform, Pump.fun has even resorted to poaching from FOMO and requiring Meme traders to sign "exclusivity agreements."
Pump.fun's adoption of such competitive business practices essentially reflects that the overseas Meme market has entered an "influencer-driven model." Whoever signs the most KOLs with strong trading influence captures the market.
The Overseas Meme Market Enters the Influencer-Driven Model
From the rise of FOMO to Pump.fun's poaching behavior, we can see an important shift occurring in the overseas Meme market: the core of market competition is no longer about launch tools, trading speed, or on-chain liquidity, but rather the battle for "attention resource carriers."
As the cultural consensus and celebrity-driven narratives that the early Meme coin market relied on begin to lose effectiveness, the Meme market shifts its focus from the Meme coins themselves to the people trading them. FOMO's rapid growth logic is precisely based on this shift in market dynamics. In this model, traders replace Memes as the new content subject. Platforms package decentralized on-chain trading behavior into a content stream akin to entertainment consumption through leaderboards, trading activity feeds, and copy-trading mechanisms. People become the new vessels of consensus.
For the vast number of retail investors lacking professional analytical skills, following a trader who has previously made millions of dollars in profit is obviously simpler than researching a newly born Meme project with no historical record.
However, this trend also signifies that the Meme market is entering a more intensely competitive stage. When trading volume and market attention are concentrated on a handful of top traders, competition between platforms naturally shifts from争夺ing users to争夺ing the "super nodes" that bring users – the Meme influencers.
This is extremely similar to the early battle for streamers in China's short-video live-streaming industry. Back then, platforms like Douyin, Kuaishou, Huya, and Douyu competed for top streamers with high signing fees, essentially competing for attention entry points. The difference is that the competition for top streamers in the short-video live-streaming industry occurred in a rapidly expanding emerging market, where user scale and commercial value were still in the growth phase, ultimately pushing the live-streaming industry toward maturity.
However, the emergence of a similar competitive model in the Meme market today reflects a completely different signal.
When platforms start competing for the same batch of "trading influencers," the winner might gain short-term growth, but it also means that the entire Meme track is losing the vitality originally formed by community culture and spontaneous propagation. For Memes, this is the greatest risk.
