Following the meme frenzy on Robinhood and Fomo, tools for tracking Fomo addresses have been popping up everywhere on X these days. Clicking on any one of them, you'll find Key Opinion Leaders (KOL) providing a "summary of Fomo-related tools" to everyone. For example, you can input a Fomo username to resolve their associated address for easy copying. Conversely, if you have an on-chain address, you can discover the corresponding Fomo account, even conducting batch identification on blockchain explorers and various monitoring pages. There are rankings, profits, APIs, Chrome extensions, and even a "prehistoric method" — opening the user's homepage, pressing F12, and directly inspecting the returned address field in network requests. The comments section is filled with gratitude, with reposts exclaiming "truly divine."

From 2017 to the present, in each bull market cycle, something of this nature emerges. However, this time around, everyone failed to realize that this tool has become obsolete.

Each of these seven tools consists of roughly a few hundred lines of code, likely crafted by individuals dedicating a weekend to their creation. What they are up against is a company that has received close to $100 million in funding, backed by over 140 angel investors and Benchmark. A few hundred lines of code against $100 million, a weekend against an empire. This isn't to say that small things lack value — all the legends of the past decade in this industry have been stories of small victories over large adversaries. However, this time, it's quite the opposite.

Following the Fomo surge, the Chinese community witnessed a peculiar phenomenon: everyone was discussing it, yet very few actually understood it. While most bots can monitor the behavior of addresses across the entire network, Fomo can only observe the actions of its own users. Some claim it's a more user-friendly trading bot, others say it's a wrapper wallet, and more see it as a new hunting ground. My knowledge of Fomo is limited to public information, but as a seasoned mobile internet entrepreneur, I am well acquainted with the dollar fund behind Fomo. This article aims to start from some fundamental principles, unraveling what Fomo is, why it is, and what it signifies, serving as a phased summary of this market cycle.

The premise of tracking addresses is that "the other party is an individual," a premise that no longer holds true

Over the past two years, "smart money" has been at the core of the Chinese on-chain community's narrative. Address monitoring, wallet labeling, and bot tracking — a full toolchain has been constructed around an assumption: on-chain transparency allows for early adopters to leave traces, and if you are a few seconds ahead of others in spotting these traces, you can get a share of the pie.

This assumption held true during Solana's meme bull market. Behind the profit addresses at that time were specific individuals who had information advantages, community support, and motivations for early positioning. Their behavior patterns could be identified and replicated. If you identified their address, to some extent, you identified the person.

However, profit addresses based on FOMO do not come from the same manner.

FOMO is a platform. The reason why top KOLs on the platform profit is not necessarily because they are smarter than you. To a large extent, it is because the platform needs them to profit. A social trading product needs a cold start, relying on new users coming in and seeing "people making money here," then following, copy trading, and staying. The platform has enough capital and motivation to ensure this happens: it can decide where to direct traffic, which assets are pushed to the forefront of the feed, and can use subsidies to create the profit curve for early KOLs.

I call this the Junket Operator Mechanism. Macau casinos do not directly approach customers; they approach junket operators, who bring customers, and the casino shares the profit with the junket operator. The junket operator seems to be winning at the gambling table, but their income actually comes from the casino's arrangement. The top KOLs on FOMO play this role: they showcase their performance on X, bring new users to the platform, and they may not even realize they are attracting users for the platform.

In Dostoevsky's "The Gambler," every character believes they have found the pattern of the roulette wheel. But the wheel never believes in patterns; it only believes in probabilities, and the casino only believes in taking a cut. The people tracking addresses today and those studying the roulette wheel 150 years ago are the same kind of people in structure.

If you go track a junket operator's address and buy with them, you are not following an individual's judgment but a company's operational strategy. This company can change its group of junket operators at any time, adjust allocation rules at any time, and your tool will always be one step behind. Every line of code in the tracking tool is built on the assumption that "the other side is an individual." When the other side becomes a company endorsed by Benchmark, this code only holds academic value.

The List of FOMO Investors Declares the End of the Grassroots Era

The malfunction of tracking tools is just a superficial issue. I believe a deeper change is that the cryptocurrency industry is no longer a grassroots industry.

Over the past decade, the most fascinating aspect of this industry was its generosity to individuals. One person, one idea, something developed over a weekend could lead to immense returns. In the 2017 ICOs, 2021 DeFi, 2024 meme coins, every wave had stories of grassroots heroes. The Chinese community, in particular, believed in this story because the Chinese community itself was founded on this story.

But that era has come to an end. The signal is the Fomo investor list.

Benchmark Capital and Index Ventures are not crypto VCs. Benchmark was an early investor in Uber, eBay, and Twitter, and is one of the oldest mobile internet funds in the U.S. This fund has a unique characteristic with very few partners, making very few investments each year, but almost all of their investments have become synonymous with their respective industries. Index Ventures is a top-tier consumer internet fund in Europe and the U.S. Their investment logic for Fomo is completely different from a16z crypto and Paradigm — they are not investing in an on-chain protocol or a token; they are investing in a mobile internet company with financial monetization capabilities.

When Benchmark invested in Uber's Series A round, they put in over $10 million and received back several billion dollars in return. What was Uber's strategy? It was to subsidize drivers and passengers with investor money, build up both sides of the network, establish network effects, and then start charging fees once the network effect took hold. The strategy of subsidizing KOLs and creating profit targets is similar in structure to Uber's driver subsidies: KOLs represent the supply side, transacting users are the demand side, and the platform initially loses money to nurture the supply side. Benchmark had already seen this script played out over a decade ago. When they invested in Fomo, they weren't looking at the blockchain; they were looking at a familiar script.

We already know that a company's valuation logic is determined by its investors. Crypto VCs look at tokenomics and TVL, while consumer internet VCs look at DAU, retention, and ARPU. When Benchmark priced Fomo using the latter logic, Fomo was built from day one according to the standards of a consumer internet company: it has an account system, network effects, a growth team, a capital reserve, and control over KOLs. It is not a tool; it is a platform. The value of a tool is determined by its users, whereas the value of a platform is determined by the platform itself.

Therefore, the logic of individual developers tracking Fomo addresses to mimic profits is no longer valid. This is not a technical issue; it is a matter of scale. Taking a script written over a weekend to compete against the operational strategy of a company that has raised nearly a hundred million dollars and has a professional growth team is not smart money; it's giving money away.

The Dominance on the Chain Has Shifted Between East and West Four Times in Ten Years

One fact that has been rarely discussed in this round of the market is that the most prominent group of Chinese KOLs from the previous Solana meme bull market has largely disappeared in this round.

They did not disappear from the market, but from the profit rankings. In the previous cycle, they were able to shine because the logic was based on asymmetric information. Those who knew first would win. They had a community, inside information, and a time window for early positioning. However, this cycle's logic is based on platform allocation; the platform determines the winners. While inside information still exists, the holders of such information have transitioned from the community to companies, and from Eastern KOLs to Western operating teams.

In this cycle, the majority of on-chain profit addresses belong to Westerners.

Zooming out a bit, consider this. A KOL's single position may be worth tens of thousands of dollars, held for a few hours—which is just an ordinary afternoon in their life. When you add up thousands of such afternoons, you witness the rise and fall of a community in a bull market cycle. When you combine several cycles of such rises and falls, you see a decade-long shift between the East and the West in the industry. Decisions are made at the smallest level, but the outcomes are decided at the largest level. The Chinese KOLs of the previous cycle did nothing wrong; they simply stood on a wheel that was turning.

Having spent nearly a decade in this industry, looking back, the dominance on-chain has always swung between the East and the West: 2017 was the Chinese-led ICO frenzy, 2021 was the Western-led DeFi Summer, and 2024 will be the meme bull market led by the Chinese community. Each swing corresponds to a paradigm shift. ICOs featured Eastern funds and Western narratives, DeFi comprised Western protocols and Eastern liquidity, and memes were characterized by Eastern communities and Western tools.

Now we are swinging back to the West. However, this time is a bit different from the previous ones. The current Western domination is not about narratives or protocols but about infrastructure.

The infrastructure for on-chain transactions is already established, and it is not in the hands of Easterners

We are witnessing a very clear process of infrastructure formation, and I believe this process has largely concluded.

Pump.fun tackled issuance. Fomo addressed accounts and social interaction. Hyperliquid and trade.xyz handled derivatives. When you add these together, they have already formed a complete on-chain trading system: from asset generation to user onboarding, from spot trading to leverage, each step has a well-established, capital-backed, and scalable Western company operating.

What is this system replacing? It is replacing the centralized exchanges dominated by Easterners over the past decade.

This does not mean that CEXs will disappear. It means that the growth is on-chain, and on-chain infrastructure is not in the hands of Easterners. The moat of centralized exchanges is licensing, liquidity, and user habits, none of which pose barriers on-chain. The barriers on-chain are the account system and network effects, and Fomo has already addressed these.

So, the Chinese community's understanding of "Smart Money" has collapsed in this paradigm shift. Not because they are not smart enough, but because the direction of their smartness is no longer aligned with market incentives. Many are still looking for a needle in a haystack, searching for addresses, building communities, waiting for the next insider tip, while the ship has already sailed.

Fomo is one level above Trading Bots and two levels above Wallets

Attributing Fomo's rise to capital operation is a lazy explanation. Capital is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. I believe Fomo has done three things right, and these three things are hierarchical.

The first level is the account system. From Metamask, Phantom to various wallets, all wallets are built on mnemonics and addresses, which is the most natural logic of blockchain but also the biggest barrier for the masses to enter this industry. Addresses are unreadable, unmemorable, there is no logical connection between different blockchains, and once the mnemonic is lost, everything is gone. Fomo maps addresses to accounts using email, generating the same address for the same email across any device, seamlessly synchronized across multiple platforms, coupled with gasless transactions and instant cross-chain transfers. For the first time, users can use an on-chain wallet like they use WeChat.

The second level is network effect. Trading itself is social, traders need to see others' positions, interact with others, and validate their own judgments. Fomo integrates the following relationship into the transaction information flow: what you see in spot and futures is the position and dynamics of those you follow. This is the fundamental difference between Fomo and all standalone wallets.

The third level is platform logic, which is the stacking mechanism mentioned earlier. Like TikTok and Kuaishou, Fomo controls traffic distribution, can create KOLs, and also decide the cap of KOLs. This layer is missing in wallets and trading bot products.

With these three layers stacked, Fomo is no longer just a crypto product but a mobile internet product. This is what Benchmark and Index see. Fomo's rise is an enterprise-level rise, a capital rise, and a rise of precise calculation.

What is Network Effect: From Sarnoff's Law to Metcalfe's Law

The term network effect has been used too widely, and I want to explain it separately because this is the layer that sets Fomo apart from all its competitors.

In the communication industry, there are three laws describing network value. Sarnoff's Law states that the value of a broadcast network is directly proportional to its audience size N, where there is no connection between the audience members. Metcalfe's Law states that the value of a communication network is proportional to N² because there are N(N-1)/2 potential connections between N nodes, as seen in telephony and WeChat. Reed's Law goes further, stating that in a network that can form subgroups, the value is proportional to 2^N because the number of groups grows exponentially.

These three laws actually answer one question: What kind of product exhibits a network effect? The answer is a product where users are connected. With each additional user, the value to all existing users increases, creating a business that scales with N². What kind of product does not exhibit a network effect? Products where each user operates independently. In a scenario with one million users versus one user, the experience for an individual user remains the same, representing a business that scales linearly with N.

The challenge lies not in the definition but in the distinction. Many products may appear identical on the surface but fundamentally differ.

SMS and WeChat provide the best example of this concept. Both platforms involve sending a message to another party with no functional differences. However, SMS operates on an N scale, while WeChat operates on an N² scale. Your social connections are embedded within WeChat; your friends are all on WeChat, and the cost of leaving WeChat is losing your entire social graph. Despite identical functionality, the value structures are completely different. This is why telecommunications companies spent two decades on SMS, while WeChat, in just two years, transformed SMS into a vehicle for verification codes.

The blockchain equivalent includes wallets, transaction bot-type products, and FOMO.

Wallets and transaction bot-type products resemble early mobile internet weather applications like Moji Weather. Weather applications fulfilled a basic need, rapidly gaining a massive user base. However, these applications scale linearly with N—whether you use Moji Weather has no impact on others using or not using it. This lack of user data retention and stickiness is evident; once the system includes a default weather feature or a more visually appealing weather application emerges, users will switch. Transaction bots follow a similar structure: the tool is highly functional, boasting a large user base, but lacks user interconnection. Your followers, copy trading history, and trading social relationships are not hosted on this platform. It is merely a tool, destined to be replaced by a superior tool.

FOMO may appear similar to transaction bots, involving monitoring coins, purchasing coins, and observing others' transactions. However, FOMO's follow relationships are entrenched; your information feed is constructed by those you follow, and the cost of leaving FOMO is losing these relationships. This mirrors the distinction between SMS and WeChat, now occurring on the blockchain. Furthermore, the ongoing group chats and communal treasuries within FOMO follow the paths from Metcalfe to Reed.

Looking one level higher, TikTok fundamentally operates as a content recommendation engine, determining which content reaches which audiences. Consequently, it can effortlessly create internet celebrities and Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) and wield power over their influence and existence. Creators rely on the platform because traffic distribution power lies within the platform's hands.

FOMO, at its core, functions as an asset recommendation engine. It decides which assets are showcased to whom and which KOL's holdings are pushed into how many people's information feeds. This engine can cultivate profitable KOLs or make a KOL disappear. The key difference from TikTok is that TikTok recommends content, while FOMO recommends assets. TikTok's monetization entails a circuitous route through advertising and e-commerce, whereas FOMO's monetization occurs the next second after the recommendation action.

Let's change the scale for a moment. In the context of a relationship, a database stores it as a single record, just a few dozen bytes, indicating who is connected to whom and when. The market value of WeChat ultimately boils down to billions of records of "who knows whom." TikTok's market value represents hundreds of billions of records of "who viewed what." What FOMO is doing is putting together "who knows whom" and "who bought what" into the same record. Individually, it's just a few dozen bytes that you can barely see, but when you add up millions of these records, you get a multi-billion-dollar company. Network effect, in essence, is this: each node is so small that it's negligible, but the connections between nodes are so significant that they can disrupt an entire industry.

FOMO is at least a multi-billion-dollar company

Following the above logic, we can make a rough estimate.

FOMO's current annual revenue is in the range of $200 million, and it's only been around for two years. For comparison, Robinhood took about seven years to reach a $1 billion annual revenue, and Coinbase took approximately six years. FOMO's growth trajectory is evidently steeper because of its network effect, something the former two lack—there are no connections between Robinhood users.

If we were to price FOMO based on the market-to-sales ratio of consumer finance platforms, when it reaches $1 billion in annual revenue, a market cap of tens of billions of dollars would be a reasonable range. However, for a platform with a network effect, a recommendation engine, and the shortest monetization path in mobile internet applications, I believe it won't stop there. It has the potential to reach the scale of ByteDance. More precisely, it's not a Web3 version of ByteDance but a perfect version of ByteDance. ByteDance needs to build a bridge between content and transactions, capturing users with content first and then converting attention into money through ads and e-commerce, leading to some loss. FOMO doesn't need this bridge; the things it recommends are transactions themselves. Therefore, in my opinion, its future market value could surpass ByteDance.

This assessment may sound radical. Still, in 2012, saying that WeChat would be more valuable than telecom operators or in 2016 claiming that TikTok would surpass TV stations seemed just as audacious at the time.

The Downfall of Smart Money, the Rise of Stack Workers, and the Beginning of the FOMO Dynasty

Back to the headline.

The downfall of smart money isn't the failure of a few individuals but the collapse of a methodology. Asymmetric information arbitrage is no longer the primary source of profit in the platform era.

The rise of stack workers isn't a moral judgment but an illustration of platform logic. When a platform controls the distribution of traffic, KOLs' roles shift from information sources to channels.

The beginning of the FOMO Dynasty was not the triumph of a single company, but the establishment of a paradigm. The cryptocurrency industry has become the monetization infrastructure for a more efficient mobile internet application.

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