Fomo raises $17M from Benchmark to become the largest crypto-native financial platform

Benchmark in their elevator. Yeah, it's it's a great question. I think there's a misconception about FOMO that it's a crypto trading app.

And right now, all of the assets currently available are digital assets and a lot of these attention based assets, but the goal in the long run is to be the largest financial platform ever built natively on crypto rails. And I think that there's a rare opportunity here.

The only other time I could think is the early internet where 100 years of infrastructure was created. Amazing infrastructure. Everyone's trying to build on new infrastructure, but it's time for real users. And I think FOMO is building the bridge to allow for accessibility to these new markets.

And so on FOMO, you could download the app, you could onboard with Apple ID in seconds. Um, you could buy digital assets with Apple Pay. Um, and core to the feature of FOMO is the social features. So, and these are uniquely enabled by onchain.

So, on FOMO, you can basically have full visibility into people's balances and discover new assets in real time. Um, it's very interesting that the last deal that Benchmark did was chain analysis because uh both of these like you don't have your own token yet. Is that correct? Yeah, that's correct.

And there there's no plans for a token. There's no plans for a token. So this is something where it feels like if I'm reading between the tea leaves like Benchmark doesn't want necessarily the underlying exposure to a fluctuating asset.

They want a business that's but they're they're interested in businesses that are built on top of crypto rails and that's where you come in. Correct. Yeah. I think Benchmark is just incredible builders of consumer products and I don't think we're really thinking about the exit right now.

We're trying to build generational company um to compete with the behemoths of the industry. I think that 10 years ago it made sense to have a centralized exchange where you have to KYC to onboard where you have to do all these checks uh where it takes 3 days to deposit from a bank account, right?

Um but you also only have access to about 50 to 70 to 90 digital assets on most of these exchanges. On FOMO, when you download the app, you have access to millions of assets instantly. And I think this is where the future is headed.

Um, and what's beautiful is if you guys went on the app, I can go to Jordy John's profile and I could see every trade you ever made on any asset.

So, right now it's mostly digital assets, but eventually you'll have equities, uh, you'll have real world assets, you'll have prediction markets, bonds, you'll have FOMO savings accounts where users can earn onchain yield, which is super hard to access, um, and everything else.

What's what's the pathway to equities as an example?

like you know uh this is something a lot of people are excited about u but I'm curious like what what the practical path is to onchain equities some some of uh they sort of exist in various ways already is that is that correct but uh what I guess I guess uh doing it in a way that is you know compliant um uh in a in a in a regulatory environment that's kind of constantly evolving.

Yeah, I think it's inevitable that everything gets commoditized into digital assets, right? Um, it's just the most efficient architecture for value transfer that's ever been created.

Um, so given that, given the ability to permissionally access the ability to hold stuff in self-custody, a lot of institutional players are starting to create equities on chain.

But I think with the market structure bill and other things in Congress and over time you'll see more clarity on native digital asset equity issuances, right? Um but in the interm it is wrapping a lot of these traditional equities on chain.

Uh movers like Robin Hood, Kraken and a lot of these big players are uh putting equities on chain and the goal is to access all of those permissionlessly in decentralized non-custodial wallets. Um the problem is historically that's impossible, right? It's really hard to do these things.

uh if you want to onboard to any of these AMMs or these onchain protocols, you need to onboard to a centralized exchange. It takes three days to get funds there. Then you need to download a decentralized wallet. Then you need to create and save your seed phrase.

Then you then you connect to the exchange and there's tons of fraud. There's not great fraud warnings and users are just getting rugged. And then you go to a block explorer and the user experience is terrible.

So, we're trying to take that whole experience and make it super simple and then have this social layer where people can discover new assets really easily. How are you thinking about building the the team? Feel like there's a lot of pressure in crypto.

Obviously, Jeff at Hyperlid has kind of set the bar on uh scale uh scale to team size, but how how are you guys thinking about it? Yeah, so our team is about 10 right now, and this is by far our competitive advantage. Our team is incredible.

um all exuilders of protocols like DYDX, Uniswap, OpenC that paved the way for consumer crypto. Um and it's the missing piece to the P puzzle here is most teams have been either really good at building trading infrastructure which is a really hard problem, right?

You need to have a router aggregator potentially build your own routing. There's tons of me which is people taking spread on user when they are trying to execute on chain. But then you also need people who can build an amazing user experience, right? And those two pieces matched is what's been missing so far.

So I really believe this is the first accessible platform for digital assets on chain that has ever existed that's really accessible to the mass market. Um we launched 6 months ago. We've already onboarded 120,000 users. Um we have added many of those users to our platform recently.

We're doing 20 to40 million in volume a day. Um and currently Solana on volume. Thanks. And currently Salana onchain volume is a $320 billion market. Meaning we're doing. 1% of that quarterly volume and that's just Salana.

So our goal is add all the chains and dominate the whole onchain spot trading market in the next 6 months. That's fantastic. Ambitious. Love it. Uh let's give it up for the Let's give it up for the sunset in the back, too. That thing is just absolutely How much did you raise? Uh we raised $17 million. There we go.

I was going to say Vlad had a nice camera, but I got the nice sunset in that's insane. That's insane. Yeah, you're you're in New York. Yeah, in Soho, New York. Is that is that a real sunset or like virtual background? That's a real sunset. It's actually really incredible right now. It's just It's just real deal.

Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah, congratulations on the round and uh I'm sure we'll have you back on soon. Have a good one. Awesome. Thanks. Cheers. Bye. Um, how'd you sleep last night, Jordan? Back in your aid. You can go to asleep.

com get pod five code TV 5ear warranty put up I've just settled into the 80 80 low 80s low 80s cuz I was in the high 80s I got an 87 play how many hours for me 6 hours 44 minutes I got I got 7 hours 11 minutes from beacon is in the reream waiting room I'm excited for this one nam he's the ex-president of Instacart welcome to the stream how are you doing what's happening welcome to the show thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us So excited to be here.

Big fan. Uh excited to chat with you guys.