fomo DAU Surge: Is Meme Trading Becoming Short-Video Scrolling?

Author: @ponyo_fp, Four Pillars

Compiled by: AididiaoJP, Foresight News

Key Takeaways

Trading has become a spectator business. On apps like fomo, every trade is posted to a public feed with its profit or loss. fomo's daily active traders grew from 1,100 to over 90,000 in a year.

Platforms now pay traders in ways that resemble how media companies pay talent. Pump.fun has paid out $483 million to creators and offered top traders a $30,000 monthly salary to trade exclusively on its platform.

In August, both apps launched "clan/squad" features that group multiple members' positions onto a single leaderboard. This is an early signal: fans are organizing into trading groups based on trade history, not follower count.

Public profit and loss shows you who is winning, but not how much you can make by following them. Of 292,531 fomo wallets, only 6% ended up profitable over a 90-day period, with a median loss of $120, and most of the top accounts' profits are unrealized gains.

On September 6, a trader posted a recruitment message. He was recruiting for his squad. This is a new feature in the pump.fun app that lets several traders' positions be grouped under one name and one leaderboard. New members join the clan and "grind together" in a Telegram voice room. He doesn't care about follower count, just proof that you can trade. The best evidence, he said, is a pump.fun account, so he can review your trade history. At the time, the squad had only 3 members, with open positions of $300,790, up 11% on the day. The goal is to scale to over $1 million.

A colleague forwarded me the post and raised the real question this article asks: Is this still trading, or has it become something else? To be clear, I also trade on fomo and pump.fun mobile, and I'm having fun, which may affect my judgment later.

Trading Is Content

Once a trade is public, it becomes content; content brings an audience; the audience then drives the next trade. What keeps this loop spinning is the phone—something that wasn't available in the last meme frenzy. In January 2025, trading happened in Telegram bots or browser terminals, and bragging happened on X. This summer, both are in the same app.

fomo and pump.fun mobile put the feed and the order button on the same screen. On fomo, the fastest-growing one, every trade is posted to a public feed with its profit or loss. Every account has daily, weekly, monthly, and all-time leaderboards. Followers are no longer "people who like your views" but "people who have seen your trades and hope the next one gets pushed to their phone."

Growth is fast. On Solana alone, fomo's daily active traders averaged 1,100 a year ago and exceeded 90,000 in August this year—not counting Robinhood Chain, which now handles most of its volume. On August 21, it ranked third among US iPhone finance apps, ahead of Cash App. Its rival launchpad pump.fun has paid $483 million to token creators since it started revenue sharing with creators last May, keeping about $653 million for itself. For every dollar the platform earns, talent takes 74 cents.

Traders Are the New Influencers

If trading is content, platforms are media companies. Media companies compete for talent. In August, a pump.fun contract for top traders leaked: a $20,000 signing bonus, a $30,000 monthly salary, minimum volume requirements, at least 4 public calls per month, and a requirement to shut down their fomo account and declare they use only one wallet.

That same month, pump.fun started paying callers who drive volume. The daily prize pool started at $15,000, rose to $300,000 within two weeks, and hit $1 million in a single day on September 1. On the day it paid out $1 million, buybacks plus call rewards ate up the platform's entire daily revenue. fomo gives referrers a quarter of the fees from people they refer. Pons gives token creators 70% of every fee.

Source: X (@CLR_fomo)

When the product itself can't differentiate, the way to grab share is to cut prices. A more hidden price cut in the market is giving people a little less security. Attention is the same commodity. Same token, same chain, same leaderboard—all an app can do is bid. Whoever bids the most for traffic wins.

The influencer economy is familiar, and it's the same here. Of the 2.23 million addresses that have received creator payouts on pump.fun, 1.67 million have lifetime earnings under $10; about 9,000 have earned over $10,000. This is the YouTube distribution, and the distribution of every medium where audiences pay talent through a platform. The difference: here the audience is also betting against the talent.

Trading Together

The emergence of Clans means the feed is starting to grow lists. fomo launched Clans on August 10, ranked by members' combined weekly and monthly profits. There were 50 at launch, and 150 three weeks later. pump.fun's version is called Squads, discovered 11 days after fomo's launch. Soon third parties started selling keys to clan private chat rooms, and the clan's internal conversations themselves became assets.

Meme trading has gone through three rounds, each a different game.

The first round, the launchpad era, was like roulette: anyone could launch, no one could see clearly, and luck determined most outcomes.

The second round, which traders themselves call the "cabal era," was more like poker: chips were loaded into bundled wallets before launch, and the hidden information was who held the supply.

The current round is more like backgammon. Everything on the board is visible. What positions the top holders have, when they opened them, and when they exit—all visible.

Clan didn't remove that hidden card; it added another. You still can't see what agreement the three people in the voice room reached before the trade was sent out.

The Vampire Attack

What an organized group with visible chips can do has been demonstrated over the past two weekends on Robinhood Chain. Robinhood issued tokenized versions of about 190 stocks, minted by an authorized participant, and only during trading hours. On Sunday, August 30, a meme coin paired with tokenized HIMS drained 81% of all 15,227 HIMS tokens, pushing the price to $132.64 on $39,000 in volume, while the stock closed at $28.84 on Friday. When the minter returned on Monday, the premium vanished within an hour. The underlying stock fell 6% that week, and no shorts were squeezed. The CEO of the company that got squeezed now follows the coin's account.

Then came AMC. A week earlier, a coin called CINEMA had already played the same trick on tokenized AMC, and almost no one noticed. On the night of September 3, the AMC CEO posted that Robinhood's tokens were a "fake market" and demanded they "stop immediately." Minutes after midnight, a coin called A MEME COIN launched; 40 minutes after his second post, its market cap hit $151 million. By 8 a.m., its pool held 547,000 of the 1.1 million tokenized AMC then in existence. The original pool was left with just 30,000 tokens. The original pool is now worth about $1 million. Robinhood's general counsel replied: "Send the lawyers over, we'll educate them." The CEO asked: "What's there to worry about?" On January 28, 2021, AMC shareholders begged Robinhood to let them buy. On September 4, 2026, the AMC CEO begged Robinhood to make it stop, and Robinhood refused. Sound familiar?

What Are the Actual Win Rates?

Anyone who has stood at a betting window knows that the favorite itself carries no information, because everyone can see it. What matters is whether the odds are fair. Public profit and loss makes the favorites crystal clear: the app itself, the top twenty accounts with $82 million in combined displayed profits, and the leaders of each clan. What it doesn't publish is the trade that latecomers face.

Midcurver77's public Dune query figured this out. In the 90 days through mid-August, of 292,531 wallets that traded through fomo Solana, 6.16% were profitable; of those, 88% made less than $100. The median wallet lost $120. These wallets lost a combined $1.26 billion. He compared it to a casino with a house edge of about 1%—over a similar period, about 37% of players would still be ahead. Meanwhile, that top $82 million is mostly unrealized gains on a few tokens in thin pools.

A few days ago I casually said that a top trader posting a thesis might be close to a past CEX listing. Half joking. Someone replied with a list already circulating that ranks traders by "which exchange tier one post is worth," with Binance spot at the top and second-tier Asian exchanges at the bottom.

The list is absurd, and neither the maker nor the sharers really believe one post equals a listing. But that's not the point. The point is: the market has started to view traders the way it used to view exchanges—whose attention can move prices.

Source: X (@ponyo_fp)

Looking Ahead

My assessment is this:

Trading has become a form of entertainment and content.

Platforms are now media companies. They compete for talent with contracts, call prize pools, and fee sharing. Attention is a commodity, and bids only go one way.

The odds for copy traders are not good, and clans don't change that. Clans only make the winning side more organized and the losing side bigger.

The vampire attacks that win are the ones that drain the float first; when the float is drained, that's a short squeeze. A short squeeze ends when the float grows again.

If you join a squad, first figure out which round of the three-round game you're in, and whether you're the one holding the dice.

Finally, leave the last word to Charlie Munger, because the betting window is the most fitting place to close. He called the racetrack the purest market: everyone's money goes into one pool, the track takes about 17% off the top, and each horse's odds are determined by the share of the pool bet on it. Everyone can see who runs fastest. But by the time you see it, everyone else has too, and the money bet on it has already pushed the payout down to almost nothing. So ordinary bettors lose the track's take, and the smarter ones lose a little less. The few who can win, he said, "bet very rarely." They wait for the crowd to misprice a horse, then bet big.