On-Chain Trading Goes Mainstream: fomo’s $75 Million Series B

Financial markets are moving on-chain. Currencies, treasuries, equities, every asset class is finding its way onto blockchain rails, which offer better infrastructure for moving value. It’s disintermediated, secure, and accessible. We’re trending towards a world where the line between what’s on-chain and what’s not will blur to the point of not mattering. Trading on-chain will simply become trading.

Although the arrow has been pointing in this direction for some time, bringing that vision to the mainstream has remained incredibly hard. On-chain trading today means juggling multiple wallets, bouncing between blockchains, paying gas fees, and navigating bridges. It takes place across a grab bag of products designed mainly for crypto insiders. The result is that while the industry has made tremendous progress in improving the underlying infrastructure and slowly getting clarity from regulators, the experience for everyday traders has lagged far behind.

This is the gap fomo is closing. Led by remarkable founders, Paul Erlanger, Se Yong Park, and Prashan Dharmasena, the team’s vision is to create the first mainstream, fully on-chain trading app, delivering the access and benefits of on-chain markets while hiding all their complexity.

Open the app, and it looks like the best of today’s consumer trading products. It’s the kind of experience that feels familiar within a few seconds of setting up an account. Under the hood, you’re accessing DeFi to its full potential, yet as a trader, you wouldn’t know it’s on-chain at all. At the heart of the app is a social layer that leverages on-chain public activity to make traders’ portfolios and live performance visible across their network, so people can discover new assets, see what the best traders are doing, and learn from them to inform their own trading patterns. That dynamic shows in the creators' fomo, which has produced several who have already built audiences of more than 100,000 followers. That focus on accessibility – Paul and Se often talk about the consumer feel they want to bring to fomo and to building for the masses – has driven the app’s strong organic growth from day one. In its first year, fomo has surpassed $4 billion in trading volume and 600,000 users.

More than anything, what drew us to fomo is the team. Paul and Se have worked together for five years, dating back to their time at Deutsche Bank, before moving to dYdX together, one of the leading decentralized exchanges. With an obsession for design and details, and their product instinct from deep inside the market, they have this rare combo: deeply crypto-native yet grounded in traditional finance, and on a real mission to bring the world on-chain.

Consumer finance has been a big part of the Index story and investment thesis over the years. We believe fomo has what it takes to continue to capitalize on a fundamental infrastructure shift that democratizes access and opens on-chain markets to a massive global audience.

We’re thrilled to lead fomo’s $75 million Series B, and to partner with Paul, Se, Prashan, and their team as they bring on-chain trading to the mainstream.