Author: Phil Jacobson, Former Vector Executive, Chief Business Officer at Altitude
Translation: Jiahuan, ChainCatcher
A few years ago, we built Vector, a mobile social trading app for on-chain assets. Starting from zero, the daily trading volume quickly broke through $20 million, with a cumulative trading volume of approximately $1 billion. In the first few months after launch, as the user base grew rapidly, Vector's retention metrics were closer to those of a great social app than a trading app. This was exactly the product we wanted to build.
At the end of 2025, we sold the company to Coinbase.
Since then, I've been watching Fomo. It has continued with a product vision similar to Vector's, but took a different path, executed brilliantly. Fomo has broken out of crypto Twitter, attracting a large number of users into the on-chain market for the first time, and its recent daily spot trading volume has surpassed $100 million.
Seeing Fomo's success, I don't think "that should have been us." On the contrary, I believe what they've achieved is remarkable. They took a product concept we deeply believed in, targeted a market we never truly explored, and ultimately reached a scale far beyond Vector.
The whole process fascinates me, and it also makes me wonder: in some parallel universe, where would Vector have ended up if we had chosen a different path?
Everything Interesting Starts as a Toy
The story of Vector actually began with Tensor.
Before joining as VP of Operations, I participated as an angel investor in Tensor's first—and only—funding round. At that time, Tensor had almost no market share. By the time I officially joined, it had become the dominant NFT marketplace on Solana, peaking at over 80% market share with tens of billions in cumulative trading volume.
About my second day in, Ilja came to me and said bluntly, "We don't know what's next for NFTs, but we think the next wave will be meme coins, and we're going to build a product around that."
What we saw wasn't just "meme coins will be the next hot asset class"; the bigger opportunity was social trading.
Trading had already become socialized. GameStop and WallStreetBets were the most obvious examples. More and more people were investing independently, relying increasingly on trusted figures online for investment decisions rather than asset managers or traditional financial institutions.
The crypto market made this behavior even more pronounced. There were always people on Twitter who could spot important trading opportunities early, like Ansem, who strongly recommended Solana when it was around $8. If you trusted his judgment and acted, you could have achieved substantial returns.
The problem was the disconnect between discovering an opportunity and executing a trade.
You might see someone you trust talking about a token on Twitter or Telegram, decide whether to participate, then hunt for the correct contract address. Executing a trade on a phone was especially cumbersome: open Phantom, open a browser, find Jupiter, connect wallet, paste contract address, verify token, input trade amount, finally execute.
For meme coins, a few minutes could be crucial. By the time you actually completed the trade, the opportunity might have vanished.
We had a firm conviction: social signals and trade execution had to be in the same product. The path from seeing a signal to executing a trade had to be as short as possible, ideally just one step.
Chris Dixon has a well-known saying: everything interesting starts off looking like a toy. We felt the same about meme coins. Meme coins were the "toy" that would help a social trading network achieve cold-start.
But our long-term vision went far beyond that. As more significant assets moved on-chain, the same social trading network could naturally extend to those assets. If a product could retain users, build a social network around trading and alpha, and provide an excellent trading experience, expanding from meme coins to stocks or other assets wouldn't be difficult, especially as more assets themselves moved on-chain.
Stocks represent actual operating businesses, while meme coins typically don't. But from the trading logic in the market, the two were becoming increasingly similar.
GameStop was an extreme and early example, but this kind of behavior was gradually becoming normal. Look at investment themes like memory, new cloud service providers, or hyperscale cloud vendors—they heavily rely on social propagation, market narratives, and price momentum.
Leopold Aschenbrenner is a recent case in point. He built strong market influence based on his judgment about AI development directions. Now investors closely watch and follow his investments in companies like Bloom Energy, CoreWeave, and Micron. His reputation and firm stance themselves became information investors reference when making judgments and placing orders.
Some of these investment theses will eventually prove correct, others won't—only hindsight will tell. But the information investment decisions rely on increasingly comes from social networks.
We believed these behaviors in the meme coin market weren't unique to meme coins. Meme coins simply amplified to the extreme a trading behavior that was spreading to broader markets.
What Real PMF Feels Like
The simplest way to explain Vector was perhaps "Instagram meets Robinhood." Instagram's core content is photos, TikTok's is videos, and in Vector, charts were the photos.
Opening Vector, you first saw a social feed. When someone shared a trade, users saw a real-time chart of that token; people who had traded that token through Vector appeared as avatars directly at their buy or sell points.
The algorithm filtered the most important signals from the entire network and pushed them into the feed. Upon seeing a signal, users could execute a trade almost immediately. Our goal was to compress the process from social signal to trade execution from minutes down to seconds, ideally even milliseconds. This contrasted sharply with the fragmented mobile trading experience of the time.
One design we pioneered was placing user avatars and trades directly onto price charts. No other product did that at the time. I remember the first time I saw it internally, my reaction was: "This is genius." Nowadays, it's interesting to see this has become a common interaction pattern in many trading apps.
A founder once described product-market fit (PMF) very simply: PMF is when users are taking the product from you faster than the team can keep up.
We knew Vector was onto something even before public launch because this happened during the testing phase. Users constantly chased us for more invite codes to bring friends in, it was even a bit chaotic.
Vector launched around late November 2024 and quickly went viral on crypto Twitter. Daily trading volume soon reached around $1 million; by late January the following year, around the time of the Trump meme coin release, peak daily volume had exceeded $20 million.
User retention was equally remarkable. Though I don't remember exact numbers, the product's 7-day retention was around 60-70%, and 30-day retention was around 40-50%. Users would open Vector frequently to trade, follow each other, share investment theses, invite friends, and copy trades from people they followed.
Our team was less than 25 people. The pressure from rapid growth hit every area: system failures, trades occasionally failing to execute, overwhelmed customer support, and an endless backlog of product requests.
This was my most direct experience of truly understanding what PMF feels like. Real demand simultaneously squeezes product, trading, support, and engineering, forcing every part of the company to accelerate, sometimes faster than the team can keep up.
This experience further reinforced one of my judgments about startups: a small team with extremely high talent density can achieve results far beyond its size. Also, nothing is more important than staying close to users.
Being customer-centric must become a top-down company culture. If the team isn't personally talking to users, handling support tickets, and understanding product gaps, it's easy to become disconnected from the problems the product actually needs to solve.
Betting on the Professional Trader Market
As the meme coin market cooled, a structural issue gradually emerged. After accumulating losses to a certain point, average users often reduced trading or left; professional traders, however, could profit, continue trading, and contributed a huge portion of trading volume.
Vector's trading volume was highly concentrated, with roughly 5% of users contributing about 95% of the volume.
Therefore, we made a rational choice: capture the professional trader market.
Professional traders have different needs than average users. They typically sit in front of multiple screens, watch many charts simultaneously, and quickly enter and exit various positions. Vector was a great mobile product, and many professional traders used it, but for them, the phone was usually a supplement to their primary trading setup, not where they did most of their trading.
Market competition also became fierce. Axiom built an excellent product, and platforms like Photon, BullX were vying for the same users. Since professional traders contributed the vast majority of volume, we began developing Vector Desktop, hoping to make it the primary trading interface for these users. At the time, this seemed the best path to win the market.
To this day, I still believe this strategy was completely sound. Vector Desktop was an excellent product, early test users loved it, and we were confident in our go-to-market strategy. However, it never officially launched, so we couldn't validate this route.
Looking back, I have another interpretation of that choice: we focused on how to compete for existing users, not how to grow the entire market. We rarely seriously considered whether we could expand the market manyfold by attracting people who had never participated in on-chain trading.
This is precisely the path Fomo ultimately chose.
What Fomo Got Right
What fascinates me most about Fomo is *which* users it chose to serve.
When we were developing the desktop app, professional traders were the most certain opportunity in the market. Axiom was growing rapidly, professional traders supported most of its platform's volume, and more products were fiercely competing for them. Most of the industry's attention was focused on this market.
Fomo chose the opposite direction.
They targeted channels outside crypto Twitter, like TikTok and Instagram, aiming at a large number of users who had never engaged in on-chain trading. Instead of continuing to compete for the same cohort of seasoned traders, Fomo aimed at a vast, often overlooked consumer market.
Timing also mattered. When Fomo started growing, the peak of the meme coin frenzy had passed. The market wasn't as euphoric as during Vector's time, and the short-term speculative atmosphere had diminished. I don't know if the same strategy would have worked as well during the market peak, but Fomo targeted different users at the right time and executed brilliantly.
They found ways to reach users through channels outside traditional crypto circles, brought these people into the product, and prompted them to execute their first-ever on-chain trade.
This wasn't easy. It required excellent distribution capabilities working in tandem with a great product: making unfamiliar on-chain trading understandable, getting users to actually start using the product, and wanting to come back repeatedly.
Fomo also accurately grasped the product details this user base truly cared about. We couldn't have just taken Vector to these channels and expected the same results. To serve these users, the product had to be redesigned for them.
The lesson here isn't that we were wrong to choose serving professional traders. I still believe Vector Desktop could have been very successful. What's more noteworthy is that beyond the existing market we were optimizing for, there existed a much larger market. We never invested enough time exploring it, and Fomo truly made this path work.
The users who help a product find PMF aren't necessarily the ones who can take it to a much larger scale.
The initial market can absolutely be the right entry point, yet may constitute only a small fraction of the ultimate opportunity. After finding a product people truly want, you still need to answer another question: which new users can this product serve, which new markets can it enter?
It's easy to say this in hindsight, but difficult to see clearly when you're in the trenches of running a company. All your data comes from the market you're serving. It can tell you how to win within the existing market, but rarely answers two questions: would users you haven't reached buy in? Could channels you've never tried bring new growth?
For us, data only showed that professional traders supported most of the on-chain meme coin trading volume. It couldn't tell us: what would happen if you brought a social trading product to a group of people who had never traded on-chain before?
Now, Fomo has validated this route with scaled growth.
Will Social Trading Be a Trillion-Dollar Opportunity?
Fomo also made me more certain that our original big-picture direction for social trading wasn't wrong, and that this opportunity is expanding much faster than anticipated.
We live in a world of increasing financialization. More people are investing and trading independently, and markets are widely discussed in public spaces. Investment ideas spread through social networks. People begin to trust certain traders, investors, and content creators, and capital flows following these information networks and group beliefs.
Trading and investing have long been distinctly social.
This phenomenon spans asset classes. It exists in meme coins and crypto assets, exists in prediction markets, and is becoming increasingly evident in stock markets.
In the future, this trend will only accelerate. The world is more connected, information spreads faster, and AI will significantly enhance people's ability to discover and synthesize information. Meanwhile, more and more assets are moving on-chain.
Stocks, prediction markets, options, RWAs, and financial products we perhaps haven't even conceived of yet are gradually migrating to a more global, 24/7 financial infrastructure.
If a product can master the high-value social networks forming around trading and alpha, coupled with an excellent trade execution experience, it has a chance to occupy a key gateway to on-chain trading.
Meme coins can be the gateway, but the product doesn't have to stop there. As more financial assets move on-chain, the product can, like adding modules, continuously integrate new asset classes.
This was always part of Vector's product vision, but observing Fomo's growth showed me more clearly just how large this opportunity is, and how quickly it's arriving. Users are already willing to trade on-chain and accept financial products with social attributes. Fomo proves this experience can reach a broad audience beyond the crypto-native market.
I think Fomo is already in a very strong position. They are expanding beyond meme coins with perpetual contracts. If the team maintains its execution, the growth space will expand even further.
The most direct analogy is Robinhood, but Fomo built the social network into the product from the start and integrated with the on-chain asset system.
Final Thoughts
If Vector had continued to develop independently, could it have become a multi-billion dollar company?
I think it absolutely could have, potentially even larger. We had a great product, an immensely talented team, and a strategy that likely would have succeeded. Perhaps we would have eventually pivoted to the broader consumer market; perhaps Fomo would still have beaten us; or perhaps Vector would be larger than Fomo today.
Maybe someday quantum technology will truly let us run this simulation in a parallel universe.
What really interests me now is being able to watch another excellent team explore a path we never walked. I've enjoyed observing this process from the bleachers. They discovered a market we never truly attempted to enter and have brought social trading to a scale far beyond Vector. I have immense respect for the product they've built.
More importantly, witnessing this has made me utterly convinced: financial markets are deeply socialized and will only become more so; simultaneously, more of the world's assets are moving on-chain.
Vector allowed us to create an early prototype of this future.
Fomo is showing just how big that future can be.
