fomo: an app born from Hell that spams garbage

There's this company called FOMO that, if you follow us on Instagram, you've probably seen spamming the ever-living crap out of my posts.

Here are just a few examples, we've deleted literally hundreds of them:

The bots actually make somewhat senseless but still English-esque comments that are relevant to the video that they're commenting on.

And the bots will sometimes have a conversation with themselves.

But it all goes to one place by the end, one way or another. They try to spread awareness for the "fomo app".

Which led me to question...

What the f*ck is the FOMO app?

Wtf is the fomo app?

I was pretty surprised by many things about the fomo app, some parts of it seem like a flat-out scam (even if it's legal), let me be entirely up front in the beginning.

Which is why I was extremely surprised to learn that they are a well funded VC-backed startup.

fomo.family was founded by FOMO Labs Inc in 2025 by ex-dYdX engineers.

The company is where "Traders become legends... from meme cones to viral tokens, trade any crypto in seconds" puke

They claim to have 500,000 traders on the app.

They also have seriously funding... they just announced their series B was led by Index Ventures and raised... $75M (!) at a $500M valuation.

They have big names in the round as well, including Index Ventures, Union Square Ventures, and Benchmark Capital

Born of Sin (IMO)

Julia Andre, partner at Index told Fortune magazine that, "We’re doing Fomo because we think there is a market shift there, and they have what it takes to capture this next wave of consumer blockchain trading.”

That's the original sin of fomo: preying on the most destructive force in retail "investing", which is short-term speculation.

Per Fortune's exclusive, the cofounders saw firsthand at dYdX how fear of missing out pushes traders to pile into buzzy memecoins and hot tokens, and also how difficult on-chain trading was, so they built an app to remove the difficulty.

The three cofounders saw how difficult trading digital assets can be. They said that there are thousands of cryptocurrencies, countless blockchains, arcane fees to pay for swapping tokens, and complicated onboardboarding processes. (doesn't seem like a big problem to me: I had no problem purchasing my first BTC in 2015 - but then again, I've never been a trader)

Disclosure: I no longer hold any BTC

“Someone should be able to onboard into Fomo, fund their account, and buy a token within like 30 seconds, regardless of if they’re familiar with crypto or not,” co-founder Dharmasena said.

Whether their familiar with crypto or not?! Wtf?!

This harkens back to the classic Jurassic Park line, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."

Yet, the bookie never carries the interest of the bettor; they only see the endless possibilities of profits from their gamblers.

The push for simplicity and the tie-in with socially motivated trading resonated with the startup's early investors. They collected over 140 angel investors, with some big names like Polygon Lab CEO Mark Boiron, former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivsasan, and Solana co-founder Raj Gokal. They closed their Series A at $17M.

Oh, yay, another finance super-app

Fomo isn't meant to just be a platform for cryptocurrencies (there's so much more to gamble on after all!)

FOMO believes the app can be a broader gateway to finance as companies put stocks, derivatives, and a whole host of assets on the blockchain.

in June, fomo listed perpetuals, a type of futures contracts with no expiration date.

The Problems with fomo app

1. "Non-custodial" is a legal strategy that could leave users holding the bag

   Fomo's big trust pitch is that they're non-custodial. They never hold your money. Your keys, your coins.

   Sounds protective. Now read what it actually buys you, straight from their Terms of Service, dated June 8, 2026.

   Their terms say the app is not an exchange, not a DEX, not a broker, and doesn't process your transactions. It's a conduit. And Section 17 says it plainer than I ever could: "not registered with or licensed by any regulatory authority."

   

   Think about what a boring brokerage owes you: SIPC protection, best execution, suitability rules, a regulator with a complaint form. Fomo owes you an interface, provided as-is. If something goes wrong, your remedies are a support email, confidential binding arbitration in New York, no class action, no jury, and a one-year deadline before your claim is permanently barred.

   It gets better. When you sign up, the app generates your wallet and, per their own terms, sends you the private keys unencrypted through a third-party provider. Unencrypted. Their word, in their document, alongside language saying they're not responsible for securing your wallet or keys.

   

   And then there's my favorite clause in the whole document. Section 6 contains a line where you, the user, agree not to swap your memecoins into a traditional cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or ETH and move them to a wallet outside of fomo.

   

   Think about that for two seconds. The non-custodial app, the your-keys-your-coins app, has you contractually agree not to convert your winnings into "real" crypto and leave. Also notice what they call your memecoin in that clause: a "digital collectible." Not an investment. Not a security. A collectible, like a Beanie Baby. The label is doing legal work.

   Your keys, your coins, as long as your coins stay in the casino.

   Users have noticed this. The App Store reviews show user reviews describing trouble getting value out and balances that show more than reality. (to be fair, the app has a 4.7/5 rating on the app store, but I can't help but question how many of these are bots? We certainly know from our own experience that fomo LOVES using bots... they've commented hundreds of times on my own posts).

   

   This is additional point of weridness of the app: their terms reserve the right to recalculate or reset performance metrics at any time... so this is probably where the withdrawal issues come from.

   

2. The fee floor is a tax on being small

   The advertised fee is a transparent 0.5%. Their terms, Section 7: 0.50% per transaction, subject to a minimum of $0.95 per transaction.

   That floor changes everything for small accounts. Run the numbers with me:

   • A $20 trade pays the $0.95 minimum. That's 4.75%, per side.

   • Buy once and sell once and you've paid 9.5% before your token moves an inch. A $2,000 trade pays the sticker 0.5% per side, 1% round trip.

   • The $20 trader pays nine and a half times the rate of the $2,000 trader. The advertised rate doesn't even become real until your trade size hits $190.

   Who trades $20 at a time? Beginners. And fomo's own funding PR brags about onboarding 68,000 first-time crypto buyers.

   Two more gems from the same fees section, quote them exactly: they do not guarantee to show you fee information before you trade, and fees can change at any time without notice, even after providing an estimate.

3. They pay for the fire hose

   Remember the bots? Here's the part that confused me for weeks: none of them link anywhere. No URLs, no referral codes. Just "fomo app," over and over.

   

   Then I found their affiliate page.

   Over $1.1 million in referral fees paid out. A commission on every qualified trade your referrals make, paid in real time, with no cap on earnings, no minimum follower count, no limit on referrals, promotable on any platform. Their words, go read it - especially if for some Godforsaken reason, you're considering using this service (please, don't).

   That is not a referral program. That's an annuity on other people's trading activity, open to anyone with an audience. Third-party reviews put the cut that referrers can earn25% of their friends' trading fees , a number I couldn't confirm on their official pages, so treat it as reported, not gospel.

   Now the funnel makes sense. A bot plants "fomo app" in my comments. Links would get filtered, so there are none. A curious viewer googles the name and lands on an entire ecosystem of affiliate sites waiting with codes, including an exact-match domain built for nothing else. The comment doesn't need to carry the payload. Google carries it.

   Let me be precise, because precision matters here: I cannot prove who runs the bots, and fomo's own terms prohibit spam and automated accounts. But they built an uncapped, real-time bounty on trading activity, opened it to anyone, and they collect their fee on every trade the machine produces. The incentive is documented at both ends. I'll let you draw the wire between them.

Final Thoughts

I hate just about everything about this app. I don't think it's good for retail investors, and it completely runs against everything Flank is trying to build.

Flank's mission is to tangibly reduce the wealth gap by bringing intelligent investing into the mainstream and restoring stakeholder capitalism. fomo seems hellbent on doing exactly the opposite. But the casino is always ready to take sucker's money.

I wouldn't recommend this app to my friends or, hell, even my enemies.

Please stay away. Learn how to invest, learn how to value and buy productive assets with wide, enduring moats.