Originally by Phil Jacobson
Compiled by / Odaily Planet Daily Golem(@web 3_golem)
A few years ago, we developed Vector, a mobile social trading app for on-chain assets. Our business grew extremely fast, scaling from zero to a peak of over $20 million in daily trading volume, with a total cumulative trading volume of around $1 billion. In the initial months after launch, as growth accelerated, our user retention behaved more like a social network than a traditional trading app, which was exactly the shape we wanted to build.
But by the end of 2025, we sold the company to Coinbase.
Since then, I've been watching how fomo has taken a product with a similar vision to ours in a different direction, executing exceptionally well. They've successfully broken out of the CT (Crypto Twitter) circle, attracted a large number of new users into the on-chain world, and recently surpassed $100 million in daily trading volume.
Seeing their success, I don't think "it should have been us." On the contrary, I think their achievement is remarkable. They adopted a product philosophy we deeply believed in and focused it on a market we never truly explored, realizing that vision on a scale far beyond ours.
The whole process fascinates me, and I can't help but imagine that in some parallel universe, perhaps we too could have taken a completely different path...
All Interesting Products Initially Look Like a "Toy"
Vector actually originated from the Solana NFT marketplace, Tensor.
Before joining Tensor as VP of Operations, I participated as an angel investor in Tensor's only funding round when the project had almost no market share. By the time I officially joined, Tensor had become the dominant NFT marketplace on Solana, at one point capturing over 80% market share, with billions in trading volume.
About a day after I joined, Ilja approached me, essentially saying: "We're not sure where NFTs are headed, but we think the next wave will be meme coins, so we're planning to build a product for that."
Our insight wasn't just that meme coins would be the next hot asset class; we believed the bigger opportunity lay in "social trading."
Trading behavior itself is inherently social. The GameStop saga and the WallStreetBets community are obvious examples. More and more people are starting to invest independently, and the basis for their actions increasingly comes from trusted individuals online, rather than traditional financial managers or institutions.
The cryptocurrency space makes this behavior even more visible. There are always people on X who can spot important trading opportunities early. Ansem is a great example, when Solana was around $8, he was an extremely vocal advocate. If you trusted his judgment and acted on it, you could have made incredible returns.
The problem is, discovering opportunities and executing trades are often completely separate steps.
You might see a trusted person post about a token on X or a Telegram group, decide to get in, and then search for the correct contract address. On mobile, the actual execution experience is terrible. You need to open your Phantom wallet, open a browser, find Jupiter, connect your wallet, paste the contract address, verify the token, set the trade size, and finally execute. For meme coins, time is money. By the time you go through all these steps, the opportunity might be gone.
Therefore, we firmly believed that social signals and trade execution should be integrated into the same product, and the distance between them should be reduced to as close to zero as possible.
a16z crypto founder Chris Dixon once made a famous point: all interesting products initially look like "toys." That's exactly how we viewed meme coins—they were the "toy" that could bootstrap a social trading network.
Our long-term vision back then went far beyond that. As more mainstream assets move on-chain, the network would naturally expand to include them. Once you have users, a social graph around trading and alpha, and a best-in-class execution experience, the jump from meme coins to stocks or other assets isn't so high, especially considering these assets themselves are increasingly moving on-chain.
Sure, stocks often have underlying businesses, while meme coins often don't; but there's increasing evidence that the way both are actually traded is strikingly similar.
The GameStop event was an extreme early case, but now this behavior is becoming increasingly common. Look at trading around memory chips, next-gen cloud services, or hyper-scale cloud providers—these trades are highly social and heavily driven by narratives and market momentum.
Leopold Aschenbrenner is a recent prime example. He built immense credibility based on his unique insights into the trajectory of AI development. Now, investors watch and follow his positions in companies like Bloom Energy, CoreWeave, and Micron. His reputation and conviction have become part of the information people use to evaluate and execute trades.
Some of these investment theses will ultimately be proven right, others won't—that's only knowable in hindsight. But it's clear that the information layer around investing has become social.
We believed that the behavioral pattern most extreme in the meme coin space isn't unique to meme coins; it's actually an amplified manifestation of a broader market trend.
What It Feels Like When You Truly Hit PMF
The simplest way to explain Vector, or fomo, is as a combination of Instagram and Robinhood. Instagram's core element is photos, TikTok's is short videos, and for Vector, the core element was charts.
Upon opening the app, users first saw a social feed. When someone shared a trade, users would see a real-time chart of that token, with the buy or sell actions of users trading through Vector displayed directly on the chart at the corresponding points.
The feed was algorithmically driven, designed to surface the most valuable trading signals in the network. Upon seeing a signal, users could execute the trade almost instantly. Our goal was to shrink the path from "social signal to trade execution" from minutes to seconds, ideally even milliseconds, a stark contrast to the terrible state of mobile trading at the time.
A concept we pioneered was displaying user avatars and trade activity directly on the charts. Nobody was doing that at the time. I remember seeing this design internally and thinking, "This is just genius." It's great to see that this UI pattern has now become standard across trading apps.
Regarding Product-Market Fit (PMF), our founding team had a simple definition: PMF means users want the product so desperately that they will literally "rip it out of your hands" before you can even supply it. Even before the official launch, we knew Vector was a hit because, during the closed beta, this frenzy was already happening—users constantly bugged us for invite codes to bring in their friends.
We launched in late November 2024 and quickly became a sensation within the crypto Twitter (now X) community. Our daily trading volume quickly reached around $1 million; by late January, during the Trump-related meme coin releases, the peak daily trading volume even surpassed $20 million.
User retention was equally impressive. While I don't recall exact numbers, I remember Day 7 retention was around 60%–70%, and Day 30 retention was around 40%–50%. Users would open Vector frequently to trade, follow each other, share investment ideas, invite friends, and copy trades from people they followed.
Our team was less than 25 people at the time, and the pressure from this explosive growth was everywhere: systems broke, trades occasionally didn't go through, the support team was overwhelmed, and there were always more features to build than people to build them.
This experience gave me a tangible feeling of what true PMF is—it was the deepest lesson I've ever learned. Demand creates pressure everywhere, pushing everything to move faster than the company's actual capacity.
It also reinforced a firm belief of mine about company building: small teams of exceptionally talented people can achieve incredible things, and nothing is more important than staying close to customers. Being customer-centric is a culture that must be embodied from the top down. If you're not in the trenches talking to users, providing support, and understanding product shortcomings, it's easy to become detached and lose touch with the product's true needs.
A Misstep: Betting on the Professional Trader Market
But as the meme coin market later cooled down, a structural problem became increasingly apparent.
Average users often end up losing most of their capital, leading to reduced trading or leaving altogether; professional traders, however, can make money, continue trading, and contribute huge trading volumes. This economic structure was extremely concentrated, with roughly 5% of users contributing about 95% of the trading volume.
Therefore, we made a rational decision at the time to pursue the professional trader market. Their needs were different from average users. They typically faced multiple screens, monitored multiple charts simultaneously, and engaged in frequent, rapid position entry and exit. Vector was a mobile product, and many professionals did use it, but for them, mobile was often a supplement to their primary trading environment, not the main venue.
Meanwhile, market competition was intensifying. Axiom built an excellent product, and competitors like Photon, BullX were all vying for the same users. Given that professional traders contributed the vast majority of trading volume, we started developing Vector Desktop. Becoming the preferred trading interface for professional traders seemed like the best path to win the market at that time.
Even today, I still think that was a very viable strategy. Our desktop product was excellent, early beta users loved it, and we had confident go-to-market plans. However, we never actually released it publicly, so we never truly validated that strategy.
Looking back, I have another perspective on our choice at the time. We focused on winning the existing market, rather than committing to expanding the market. We spent far too little time thinking about the question: "Could we dramatically grow the market by attracting new users who have never done on-chain trading before?"
And that is precisely the path fomo ultimately chose.
What Makes fomo's Success Unique
The most interesting aspect of fomo to me is their choice of strategic focus. When we were developing the desktop product, the obvious opportunity in the market was serving professional traders. Axiom was growing rapidly at the time, professional traders dominated the market economics, many products were fiercely competing for this group, and it was the focus of the entire industry's attention.
fomo chose a completely different path.
They looked towards audiences outside of TikTok, Instagram, and the CT circle, many of whom had never done on-chain trading before. Instead of competing for those sophisticated traders, they targeted a massive consumer market that most other companies in the industry were overlooking at the time.
Timing was also crucial. fomo rose after the meme coin frenzy subsided, when the market environment was no longer as crazy and profit-driven as when we were operating. I'm not sure if the same strategy would have worked at the peak of the frenzy, but they targeted a different user group at the right time and executed brilliantly.
They found ways to reach users outside the traditional crypto circles, onboard them to the product, and facilitate their first on-chain trade. This is by no means easy, as it requires excellent distribution channels working hand-in-hand with a great product—making something as unfamiliar as "on-chain trading" simple for the average person, successfully converting users, and providing reasons for them to keep coming back.
fomo nailed the product experience details that mattered to that target audience. If we hadn't adapted the product for that type of user, simply releasing the Vector we had back then into those distribution channels wouldn't have achieved the same results.
But I don't think our decision to serve professional traders back then was wrong. I still firmly believe our desktop strategy could have been very successful. The more valuable insight is that outside the market we were deeply focused on, there existed a much larger market that we didn't invest enough time exploring, and fomo did, successfully opening it up.
The market that helps you achieve PMF may not be the one that can support your large-scale growth.
The first target market an entrepreneur finds might be the perfect "beachhead," but it may represent only a small part of the ultimate market opportunity. Once you find a product users truly crave, it's worth asking another question: where else could this product work wonders?
Hindsight is 20/20, but in the heat of operations, realizing this is much harder. Your data comes from the market you're currently serving. This data can powerfully guide you on how to win that market, but it rarely reveals insights about users you haven't acquired or distribution channels you haven't fully tested.
In our case, the data at the time showed professional traders dominated the economics of on-chain meme coin trading. However, what the data couldn't predict was what would happen if a social trading product was pushed to a completely new group of people who had never done on-chain trading.
fomo has provided the answer.
Is Social Trading a Trillion-Dollar Opportunity?
What fomo has made me even more certain of is that the original thesis about social trading was not only directionally correct, but the speed and scale of this opportunity far exceeded our initial expectations.
We live in an increasingly financialized world. More and more people are starting to invest and trade independently, market dynamics become topics of public discussion, investment ideas spread through social networks, people build trust in specific traders, investors, and creators, and capital flows along these networks of information and consensus.
Trading and investing are inherently social. This applies across all asset classes—whether meme coins, cryptocurrencies, prediction markets, or even the stock market, the situation is the same.
I believe this trend will only accelerate. The world is becoming more connected, information spreads faster, and AI will greatly enhance the ability to discover and synthesize information. At the same time, more and more assets are migrating on-chain. Stocks, prediction markets, options, real-world assets (RWAs), and even financial products we haven't conceived of yet are converging onto an increasingly global, 24/7 financial infrastructure.
If you can build a high-quality social graph around trading and alpha, coupled with exceptional execution, you occupy a very advantageous position. Meme coins can serve as an entry point, but product development goes far beyond that. As more of the financial world moves on-chain, asset classes become increasingly modular.
This was always part of Vector's vision, but fomo's journey has given me a more concrete sense of its scale and timing. People are ready for on-chain trading and ready for a social financial experience. fomo has proven that this experience can absolutely reach a broad audience beyond the crypto-native market.
I think they are in a very strong position. They have started venturing into perpetual contracts, moving beyond just meme coins. If they can maintain strong execution, their growth opportunity is immense. A typical analogy is Robinhood, but fomo has a social graph and an on-chain asset system built into the product from the start.
Conclusion
If we had persisted, could Vector have grown into a multi-billion dollar company?
I think it was entirely possible. Perhaps even far beyond that. We had an excellent product, a talented team, and a strategy I believe had strong potential for success. Maybe we would have started there and eventually moved into the broader consumer market; maybe fomo would have still beaten us; or perhaps we would have grown even larger than fomo is today.
Maybe someday quantum technology will let us fulfill that wish in a parallel universe. For now, what interests me most is watching another excellent team (fomo) explore a path we didn't take.
I'm witnessing it all from the sidelines. They opened up a market we never truly entered back then and have advanced the social trading model to heights far beyond where we were. I have immense respect for everything they are building.
More importantly, watching this process has made me even more convinced that financial markets are inherently highly social, and as more global assets move on-chain, this attribute will only strengthen.
Back then, we tried to build an early prototype of this future form through Vector. And fomo's trajectory is showing us just how massive the future scale of this field can be.
