Crypto Exchanges are in Serious Trouble | Se Yong, fomo

Ran (0:00)

I want to read this tweet, which I got from you on the 11th of January 2025 I didn't read the message.

Se Yong (0:05)

January 11th, 2025, I don't even think we had a single engineering hire yet. Like it was this very slow thing where like we had 10 traders and maybe eight of them were FOMO. Take zero money, we're not going to pay you, but come build this thing with us because we think it can be really cool and nobody joined. Something is telling the market that the product is not good enough. And it turned out there was this one token that everybody wanted to buy. And FOMO was the only place you can buy it. We literally went 10x in one day.

Ran (0:26)

Where are you guys today?

Se Yong (0:27)

We are 2.5 million total users. We have about 700,000 come back daily.

Ran (0:32)

That's insane. That's obscene. This must be the biggest miss of all time on my part. This is the biggest miss of all time.

Se Yong (0:40)

So we're about 20 full time people, maybe a little bit more. In 18 months, I'd love to be at 150 million users. For me, this is the NBA. This is like we were at the highest level at the biggest stage in the world at one of the fastest growing companies and one of the fastest growing industries. Today, I would say that FOMO is a social platform.

That is supported by trading. But our goal is to get to a place where essentially FOMO connects anybody in the world with markets and with each other.

Ran (1:05)

Is there anything that scares you? Is there anything that keeps you up at night?

Se Yong (1:07)

Execution risk. But he's like, man, like on-chain trading is going to be the future of finance. So now it's a lot more crowded. Are we going to get there fast enough?

Ran (1:14)

What is the scariest moment in the last 18 months? Was there a moment where you thought you were going to lose it all, it was never going to happen?

Se Yong (1:21)

Honestly?

Ran (1:25)

So look, I don't usually start a podcast like this, but I want to read this tweet, which I got from you on the 11th of January, 2025 It said, GM Bro, wondering if you write Angel Checks, building a product that's a competitor to Moonshot, and in brackets it says trading app, with a super strong team, would love to share with you in case you're interested. Some recent commitments, and you gave a list of recent commitments, including Wintermute, including Geordie, including a whole lot of other people. That was on the 11th of January, 2025, and I didn't read the message. I only opened the message in September, 2026 But by that time, you guys had built one of the biggest consumer apps in crypto. I think if I'm not mistaken today, you got 2.5 million users, you're doing $1.5 million in revenue a day, more or less.

When you texted me this, what were you building?

Se Yong (2:17)

Yeah, I mean, I think we've had the fortune of building the same thing since day one, where we wanted to build an on-chain app that's accessible, that has social layer. And January 11, 2025, I don't even think we had a single engineering hire yet. So we might have just been at the point where we were getting our third co-founder Prashan and not a single line of code was written. It was just an idea, a dream, and kind of just what we thought was an opportunity to deliver a really good experience to the market.

Ran (2:41)

So what were you raising? And at what valuation were you raising then?

Se Yong (2:45)

So we did about $2.2 million. I think we wanted to do two, and we did that at about $20 million valuation. But we did give a discount to a lot of people, because we wanted to make sure that people felt like, hey, I could get in lower than whatever the standard is, which I think everybody does too at 20 We ended up doing most people at $17.5 million, and some a little bit lower, depending on size or commitments.

Ran (3:04)

So you were selling about 10% to 15% of the tokens, and you were selling them at a $20 million valuation. What do you think the business is worth today?

Se Yong (3:14)

Yeah, I mean, that was all equity. I think there was a token warrant, but we don't plan to do a token. So it'll be hopefully something that translates to an IPO. It's hard to say.