Author: Phil Jacobson, former executive at Vector, Chief Business Officer at Altitude
Translated by: Jiahua, ChainCatcher
A few years ago, we created Vector, a mobile social trading application for on-chain assets. The product started from scratch, quickly surpassing $20 million in daily trading volume, 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 performance was more akin to that of an excellent social application rather than a trading application. This is precisely the product we aimed to create.
At the end of 2025, we sold the company to Coinbase.
Since then, I have been following Fomo. It has continued with a product concept similar to Vector, but has taken a different path and executed it exceptionally well. Fomo has already broken out of the crypto Twitter circle, attracting a large number of users who are entering the on-chain market for the first time, with recent daily spot trading volumes exceeding $100 million.
Seeing Fomo's success, I don't feel like "this should have been us." On the contrary, I think their achievements are remarkable. They have taken on a product concept that we firmly believed in, targeting a market that we never really ventured into, eventually reaching a scale far beyond that of Vector.
The entire process mesmerizes me and leads me to ponder: in some parallel universe, if we had chosen a different path, where would Vector have ended up?
All interesting things initially look like toys
The story of Vector actually began with Tensor.
Before joining the company as Vice President of Operations, I participated as an angel investor in Tensor’s first and only round of funding. At that time, Tensor had almost no market share. By the time I officially joined, it had already become the dominant NFT trading market on Solana, peaking with a market share exceeding 80% and cumulative trading volume reaching several billion dollars.
On about my second day of work, Ilja came to me and bluntly said, "We don't know what's next for NFTs, but we believe the next wave will be meme coins, and we want to build a product around that."
What we saw was not just "meme coins will become the next hot asset class," the bigger opportunity was actually social trading.
Trading had long since become socialized. GameStop and WallStreetBets are the most obvious examples. More and more people are beginning to invest independently, and when making investment decisions, they increasingly rely on trusted people online rather than asset managers or traditional financial institutions.
The crypto market makes this behavior even more apparent. There are always some people on Twitter who can seize important trading opportunities first, and Ansem is a great example. When Solana was still around $8, he was strongly recommending it. If you trusted his judgment and took action, you might have gained considerable returns.
The problem is that discovering opportunities and executing trades are disconnected from each other.
You might see someone you trust discussing a certain token on Twitter or in a Telegram group, decide whether to participate, and then look for the right contract address. Completing the trade on your phone is particularly troublesome: open Phantom, then open the browser, find Jupiter, connect the wallet, paste the contract address, verify the token, enter the trade amount, and finally execute the trade.
For meme coins, a few minutes of delay can be crucial. By the time you actually complete the trade, the opportunity may have vanished.
We had a very firm judgment on this: social signals and trade execution must be integrated into the same product, and the path from seeing the signal to completing the trade must be shortened as much as possible, ideally to a single step.
Chris Dixon has a well-known phrase: all interesting things initially look like toys. We viewed meme coins in the same way. Meme coins are the “toys” that help kickstart the social trading network.
But our long-term vision goes far beyond that. As more important assets move on-chain, the same social trading network can naturally extend to those assets. If a product can retain users, build a social network around trading and alpha, and provide an excellent trading experience, then expanding from meme coins to stocks or other assets isn’t difficult, especially with more and more assets themselves going on-chain.
Stocks are backed by actual businesses, while meme coins typically are not. But from the perspective of trading logic in the market, the two are increasingly becoming similar.
GameStop is an extreme and early example, but this behavior is gradually becoming the norm. Look at investment themes like memory, new cloud service providers, or ultra-scale cloud manufacturers; they all rely heavily on social dissemination, market narrative, and price momentum.
Leopold Aschenbrenner is a recent typical case. He has built a strong market presence based on his judgment of AI development directions, and investors now closely monitor and follow his investments in companies like Bloom Energy, CoreWeave, and Micron. His reputation and firm stance also provide reference points for investors when making judgments and placing orders.
Ultimately, some of these investment logics will be proven correct, and some will not; only hindsight will tell. But the information relied upon for investment decisions increasingly comes from social networks.
We believe that these behaviors in the meme coin market are not unique to meme coins. Meme coins have simply amplified a trading behavior that is spreading to broader markets.
What does real PMF feel like?
The simplest way to explain Vector is probably "a combination of Instagram and Robinhood." The core content of Instagram is photos, TikTok's core content is videos, while in Vector, charts are the photos.
Upon opening Vector, the first thing you see is a social information feed. When someone shares a trade, the user sees the real-time chart for that token; those who have traded that token on Vector will appear as avatars at their respective buy or sell positions.
The algorithm filters out the most important signals from the entire network and pushes them to the information feed. Upon seeing a signal, users can almost instantly complete the trade. Our goal is to compress the process from social signals to executing a trade from several minutes to a few seconds, ideally down to the millisecond level. This stands in stark contrast to the fragmented mobile trading experience at the time.
One of the designs we experimented with first was placing user avatars and trades directly on the price charts. At the time, no other product did this. I remember when I first saw it internally, my immediate thought was, "This is simply a genius design." Today, this has become a widely adopted interaction method in many trading applications, which is interesting to see.
The founders described product-market fit (PMF) in a very straightforward way: PMF occurs when users snatch the product from you at a speed faster than the team can respond.
Before we officially launched, we already knew that Vector had found its direction because during the testing phase, this situation had precisely occurred. Users continuously chased us for more invitations to invite friends, and the scene even became somewhat chaotic.
Vector went live around the end of November 2024 and quickly became popular in the crypto Twitter circle. The daily trading volume rapidly reached about $1 million; by late January of the following year, around the time of the Trump meme coin launch, the peak daily trading volume had exceeded $20 million.
User retention was also astonishing. Although I no longer remember the exact numbers, I recall the 7-day retention rate was around 60% to 70%, and the 30-day retention rate was around 40% to 50%. Users frequently opened Vector to trade, follow each other, share investment logic, invite friends, and trade according to what people they followed were doing.
At that time, our team had fewer than 25 members, and the pressure from rapid growth showed at every level: system failures, trades occasionally failing to execute, customer service being overwhelmed, and always having an endless stream of product demands.
This was the most direct experience for me, allowing me to truly understand what PMF feels like. Genuine demand will simultaneously put pressure on products, trades, customer service, and R&D, forcing every aspect of the company to accelerate, even to the point where the team cannot keep pace.
This experience also reinforced one of my judgments about entrepreneurship: a small but highly talented team can achieve results far beyond its size. At the same time, nothing is more important than staying close to users.
Customer-centricity must become a top-down corporate culture. If the team does not personally communicate with users, handle customer service issues, and understand product gaps, it is easy to become disconnected from the actual problems that the product needs to solve.
Betting on the professional trader market
As the meme coin market cools down, a structural problem gradually emerges. Ordinary users tend to reduce trading or even leave after their losses accumulate to a certain extent; professional traders, however, are different—they can profit, continue trading, and contribute a significant amount of trading volume.
Vector's trading volume is highly concentrated, with about 5% of users contributing approximately 95% of the trading volume.
Therefore, we made a rational choice: to capture the professional trader market.
The needs of professional traders differ from those of ordinary users. They typically sit in front of multiple screens, observing a large number of charts simultaneously, and quickly enter and exit various positions. Vector is an excellent mobile product, and many professional traders use it, but for them, the phone is usually just a supplement to their main trading device, rather than the place where they complete most of their trades.
Market competition has also become exceptionally fierce. Axiom has created a very excellent product, while platforms like Photon and BullX are also competing for the same group of users. Since professional traders contribute the vast majority of trading volume, we began developing a desktop version of Vector, hoping to make it the primary trading interface for these users. At that time, this seemed to be the best path to winning the market.
To this day, I still believe that this strategy is completely sound. Vector's desktop product is outstanding, and early test users liked it very much, and we were equally confident in our market promotion strategy. But it ultimately did not officially launch, and therefore we could not validate this route.
Looking back, I have a new understanding of the choice we made at that time: we were focused on how to compete for existing users rather than how to expand the entire market. We rarely seriously thought about whether we could expand the entire market by attracting users who had never participated in on-chain trading.
Fomo ultimately chose this path.
What did Fomo do right?
What interests me most about Fomo is the type of users it chose to serve.
When we were developing the desktop version, professional traders were the most certain opportunity in the market. Axiom was rapidly growing, and professional traders accounted for the majority of trading volume on the platform, with more and more products fiercely competing for them. Most of the industry's attention was concentrated on this market.
However, Fomo chose the opposite direction.
They targeted channels beyond crypto Twitter, such as TikTok and Instagram, focusing on a large number of users who had never participated in on-chain trading. Fomo did not continue to compete for the same group of mature traders, but aimed at a massive consumer market that had been largely overlooked by the industry.
Timing was also crucial. When Fomo started to develop, the peak of the meme coin craze had passed, and the market was not as frenzied as it was during Vector's time; the atmosphere of short-term speculation had also eased. I don't know if the same strategy would have achieved similar results during the market peak, but Fomo chose a different user at the right time and executed it exceptionally well.
They found a way to reach users through channels outside the traditional crypto circle, bringing these people into the product and guiding them to complete their first on-chain transaction.
This is not easy; it requires excellent distribution capabilities and outstanding product synergy: making unfamiliar on-chain trading easy to understand while also getting users to actually start using the product and wanting to come back repeatedly.
Fomo also accurately grasped the product details that these users truly cared about. We couldn’t simply take Vector to these channels and expect the same results. To serve these users, the product had to be redesigned specifically for them.
The lesson here is not that our choice to serve professional traders was wrong. I still believe that Vector's desktop strategy could have been very successful. What is more worth noting is that beyond the continually optimized existing market, there exists a much larger market. We had never invested enough time to explore it, while Fomo has truly perfected that route.
The users who helped the product find PMF may not be the ones to drive it to greater scale.
The initial market can certainly serve as the right entry point, but it may only account for a small fraction of the final opportunity. After finding out the product that people truly want, another question must be answered: what other new users can this product serve, and which new markets can it enter?
Saying this in hindsight is easy, but it is difficult to see when operating on the front lines of the company. The data you have all comes from the market you are serving, which can tell you how to succeed in the existing market but struggles to answer two questions: will the untapped users buy in, and can the untested channels bring new growth?
For us, the data could only indicate that professional traders accounted for the majority of trading volume in the on-chain meme coin market. But it couldn't tell us: what would happen if a social trading product were brought to a group of people who had never traded on-chain?
Today, Fomo has validated this route with scaled growth.
Will social trading be a trillion-dollar opportunity?
Fomo has also made me more convinced that we were not wrong about the overall direction of social trading, and this opportunity is expanding at a pace far exceeding expectations.
We live in a world where financialization is increasing. More and more people independently invest and trade, and the market is widely discussed in public spaces. Investment ideas are disseminated through social networks, and people are beginning to trust certain traders, investors, and content creators, with funds flowing along these information networks and group beliefs.
Trading and investing have long had distinct social attributes.
This phenomenon spans different asset classes. It exists in meme coins and crypto assets, in prediction markets, and is becoming increasingly evident in the stock market.
In the future, this trend will only continue to accelerate. The world is becoming more interconnected, information spreads faster, and AI will significantly enhance people's ability to discover and integrate information. At the same time, more and more assets are transitioning to the on-chain environment.
Stocks, prediction markets, options, RWAs, and financial products we may not yet have imagined are gradually migrating to a more globalized, around-the-clock financial infrastructure.
If a product can master the high-value social network forming around trading and alpha, combined with excellent trade execution experience, it could occupy a key entry point for on-chain trading.
Meme coins can serve as an entry point, but the product doesn’t have to stop there. As more financial assets move on-chain, products can continually incorporate new asset classes like adding modules.
This has always been part of Vector's product vision, but observing Fomo's growth has made me more clearly see just how large this opportunity is and how fast it is arriving. Users are not only willing to trade on-chain, but also open to financial products with social attributes. Fomo has proven that this experience can reach a large audience beyond the crypto-native market.
I believe Fomo is in a very favorable position. They are breaking out of the meme coin market with perpetual contracts. If the team continues to maintain their execution power, the growth potential will further expand.
The most direct analogy is Robinhood, but Fomo has incorporated social networking into its product from the beginning while integrating into the on-chain asset system.
Final thoughts
If Vector had continued to develop independently back then, could it have become a billion-dollar company?
I think it’s entirely possible, and it might even have reached a larger scale. We had a great product, a talented team, and a strategy that was likely to succeed. Perhaps we would have eventually turned towards a broader consumer market; perhaps Fomo would still have outperformed us; or perhaps Vector would be larger than Fomo today.
Maybe one day, quantum technology will truly allow us to run this simulation in a parallel universe.
What truly interests me now is watching another excellent team explore a path we have never taken. I enjoy sitting on the sidelines observing this process. They have discovered a market we have never truly attempted to enter and have scaled social trading far beyond that of Vector. I have great respect for the product they have built.
More importantly, witnessing all of this has completely convinced me: financial markets have become deeply socialized and will only become more so; meanwhile, more and more global assets will also transition to the on-chain environment.
Vector once allowed us to get a glimpse of this future.
Fomo is showcasing just how vast this future can be.
免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。
