Social Trading and The Garden of Eden
For years the cryptoeconomy searched for a breakout consumer application.
For years the cryptoeconomy failed to produce one as capital poured endlessly into “Web 3” with the mistaken belief that such an application would be skeuomorphic to what won in Web 2.
In parallel, blockchain’s first killer application beyond money emerged in permissionless global 24/7 trading. Today it's the most profitable sector of the onchain economy.
At first it went underappreciated as trading was constrained by wallet and blockchain infrastructure. Wallets used to be clunky desktop plug-ins before they became sleek mobile applications. Blockchains used to be slow and expensive with limited asset support before they became performant platforms to trade anything from memecoins to equities.
Today with this all as a tailwind and a new cycle on the horizon, a new form factor for trading is emerging with the potential to take the cryptoeconomy mainstream.
That form factor is social.
In many ways, social trading is a natural evolution of onchain trading. The community has long shared ideas on social media and copy traded with extra steps. Social trading just marries the two by using blockchains as the underlying substrate where all transaction data is transparent and accessible in real-time. What’s possible are new social networks centered around finance.
Below I explore the rise of social trading, the “TikTok of Finance” thesis, and whether any of these apps can escape their “original sin” of speculation and bring blockchains to the masses.
The Rise of Social Trading
Speculation is thezeitgeist. It's been this way since 2020 after the central banks launched their monetary bazookas and catalyzed this world of funny money and rolling bubbles.
At the same time finance is more democratized than ever. Smartphones and deregulation made the tools of speculation more accessible. The internet and social media leveled the playing field regarding access to information. Communities emerged to educate each other.
The consequence is that more and more people across the globe are becoming traders, with retail activity continuing to smash records.
Blockchains sit at the intersection of all these trends with social trading as its newest and highest-octane expression.
At the foundation sit chains like Hyperliquid and Solana which provide the infrastructure for anyone, anywhere, to speculate on anything, anytime – a structural advantage in today’s world where the hottest assets to trade may be metals one week and memory stocks the next. The output of all this activity is recorded on a transparent ledger, which makes data such as trading history and portfolio positions observable in real-time.
Above them sit mobile applications like Fomo and Pump. These products surface this data to underpin new social networks centered around speculating. The magic is that PnL flexing, copy trading, idea sharing, and social banter can all live in the same interface. The result is a reflexive flywheel where trading creates content, content attracts attention, and attention drives more trading.
Over the past couple months, social trading has produced some of the fastest growing applications in the industry and become one of crypto’s most effective channels for onboarding new users. The primary attraction is access to extreme upside potential that can’t be found anywhere else such as trading AI equities with 20x leverage or memecoins that could 1,000x. When paired with buttery smooth product experiences that abstract away crypto’s past UX frictions and aggressive marketing on Instagram and TikTok, the growth has been unsurprisingly explosive.
Already today Fomo and Pump have reached similar daily active user counts as Polymarket, Hyperliquid, and Phantom, which possess ~60K - 100K each. Social trading applications are also the fastest growing segment of builder code interfaces on Hyperliquid, accounting for ~33% of all builder code volume.
What’s more is that the leading products aren’t shying away from their speculative purpose either compared to the prior generation of virtue signaling fintechs.
Pump your coins. Feel the fomo. Trade the hype. And while you’re at, have fun. The leading brands in the industry are breaking the 4th wall and letting you in on what it's all about. The names of the products themselves are charged with the spirit of speculation.
Remember we’re in the age of funny money with more millionaires being minted than ever over the past year. So in many ways these products are simply meeting consumers where they are. Socializing the process just adds fuel to the fire when the money making is laid bare for all to see.
Finance “For You”
Today, onchain trading products capture less than 0.5% of global daily active traders. While blockchains have made tremendous progress onboarding new asset classes and improving performance to compete with the traditional financial system, the truth is this industry is still in its adolescence.
The leading social trading applications are even earlier in their evolution with a ton of product development ahead of them. Take Fomo and Pump as an example. Each currently serves a relatively homogenous community of memecoin traders and delivers them more or less uniform feeds.
This may be fine if memecoins are the wedge to get new users onboarded. But limiting if either wants to expand beyond that.
Most social networks today have already evolved beyond the “town square” model where everyone sees the same content. In their place are “for you” feeds that algorithmically surface more personalized content to each user. In doing so leading social platforms have increased engagement and monetization.
While it's not clear whether social trading apps will optimize for engagement, trading volume, or something else, in any case personalization will likely be central to driving greater usage.
In fact, this is probably the biggest untapped opportunity in the sector. The combination of offchain social data and onchain transaction data creates rich training inputs for recommendation algorithms that could dramatically improve the product experience.
Imagine for example a system that observes every impression and subsequent action. You lingered on a memecoin for 30 seconds. Clicked the chart. Checked the holders. Saw that a top ranked trader bought it. Bought $1000. Sold after a 30% gain. Shared it with two friends. Then longed Micron with 10x leverage ahead of its earnings.
Over time such a system could learn a latent representation of your speculative psychology. What sectors you like, your sensitivity to momentum, what mix of obscurity and social validation gets you over the line, how all of this changes after you win or lose.
You could even imagine this being used to recommend the same asset to different users through entirely different narratives. A technical thesis from a leading fundamental analyst for one, a funny video for another, a buy signal from a top ranked trader for a third.
The big picture idea is that just as social platforms optimize how content is packaged and distributed, social trading platforms could eventually do the same for financial opportunities.
I suspect that whichever team(s) figures this out has the potential to create the “TikTok of finance”, marrying the use of AI recommendation algorithms and 24/7 global trading of any asset in the world.
A Financialized MMORPG
With each passing year, trading is evolving more and more into a next generation MMORPG, complete with narratives, heroes, villains, and status hierarchies.
You can already see it in how today’s retail speculators are more inspired by solo traders like Ansem and GCR than any professional VC or hedge fund manager. It is also apparent in times of turbulence as when Garrett Jin’s public nine figure liquidation on Hyperliquid became a spectacle for hundreds of thousands of people on crypto twitter back in February.
While this dynamic has partially existed in the traditional financial system for decades, the feedback loop was too long for it to matter. At best you could just wait for delayed 13F filings to see what Stanley Druckenmiller owned or parse congressional disclosures to find out what stocks Nancy Pelosi bought. Or worst wait for the news to drop to find out that a big fund just got liquidated after your longs already got smoked.
What makes this “trading as an MMORPG” dynamic exciting within the context of social trading is when you financialize it all. At the core of it is the idea that building a reputation on a social trading platform enables you to earn more money than you would otherwise in obscurity.
Already today you have projects like Pump and Fomo giving payouts to creators that drive volume to their mobile application and deployers that create new memecoins for users to trade. To date Pump has paid out over $450M in rewards to deployers, with rewards to mobile application creators just getting started. For context this is already 15% of what Meta paid to all its content creators on Facebook in 2025 and Pump has achieved this at a microfraction of its scale.
Add in airdrops to power users, referral fees, off-platform KOL deals for top creators, and you can see how this all can get much bigger. The potential to make money whether trader, creator, or both is enormous.
In the coming years, social finance creators will make money that rivals top social media influencers. Solo traders will run up 8 - 9 figures publicly. Groups will command more capital than institutional funds. PnL leaders will command followings like celebrities. Autonomous agents will compete for the crown. Trading will resemble sports.
Of course not everyone will want to be tracked. Some legendary traders will scoff at leaking their alpha publicly or doxxing their net worth. Nevertheless a new generation of stars will emerge that want the public track record.
Moreover, while there will be obvious examples of influencers abusing their reputation by pumping and dumping on their followers, the beauty of these platforms is that everything is public. You scam people, you lose your reputation. You lose money, people stop following you. You trade on other wallets, no one cares.
This dynamic will matter less anyways as non-memecoin centered trading ramps up as it has been both for leaders like Fomo and up and coming players like Invo and Legends.
Again speculation is the zeitgeist. Social trading in this context is like kerosene. The product of it all is to transform finance into the biggest MMORPG on Earth.
A Long Dance With Speculation
By this point, I’m sure some of you reading this are thinking that this sounds cool and all, but didn’t we used to dream about banking the unbanked and freeing global finance from extractive intermediaries? What could retail users jamming memecoins and trading AI stocks with 20x leverage possibly have to do with any of this?
I can assure you I’m no Gordon Gekko. I’m not encouraging that people should gamble their life savings or suggesting that the fact that some people will is good. The idea that speculation “stress tests” blockchain infrastructure doesn’t resonate much either anymore, true as it may be.
But what’s also true is that speculation has always been the initial spark for everything useful this asset class has produced.
The first use case of stablecoins in the 2010s was helping traders transfer funds between exchanges without volatility. Before the 2024 U.S. presidential election, prediction markets were just a niche betting product for retail speculators. In the decade leading up to 2026, perpetual swaps were just a tool for retail traders to make leveraged bets on cryptocurrencies.
The same goes for the leading blockchains as well.
Ethereum’s first use case was sending money to founders for ICO’s in 2017. Then in 2020 it was yield farming during the speculative DeFi summer era. In 2023 Solana broke out as the canonical memecoin platform after it solidified itself as the most performant blockchain in the bear market. Hyperliquid is the fastest growing blockchain since 2024 given it enables people to speculate on all the hottest assets with extreme leverage.
The common thread here is that speculators were the pioneers willing to stomach this high-risk frontier of digital property rights and code-enforced contracts. And speculation served as a beachhead for many of the winning products and chains in the cryptoeconomy.
When you think about it, it makes sense too. There’s friction moving your money from traditional brokerages and banks. So you need to offer unique opportunities that people can’t or struggle to find anywhere but onchain. Theoretical reasons and philosophical appeals are simply not enough.
And if the history isn’t convincing, then just look at users’ willingness to pay for these products. Take the memecoin supply chain for example. Between Pump bonding curves, third party interfaces like Fomo, and underlying infrastructure like Jito and Solana, users often pay 2% - 3% per swap. This is 20x - 30x more than what people pay to trade majors on spot exchanges like Binance. Is this not one of the strongest indicators of how strong an attraction that speculation is?
The Garden of Eden (and The Original Sin)
The beauty of blockchains is that every protocol is global and permissionless to build atop, which enables them to be composed like legos. What this means is that while fintech applications of the past may have needed to build every product from scratch, then go jurisdiction by jurisdiction getting the requisite licenses to serve customers, crypto native applications can theoretically have any financial product they want out of the box with global distribution on day 1.
In the past we used to call this the DeFi mullet thesis. Consumer facing fintech applications would create a smooth UI/UX while blockchains sat underneath powering the new financial system.
Today we’re seeing the early signs of this playing out with protocols like Morpho powering Earn programs on Coinbase and Robinhood. Hyperliquid powering perpetual swaps for Phantom and Metamask. The latter two of which also even offer stablecoin powered cash cards for payments. In the long-run, it’s likely that most of these applications will offer all basic banking and brokerage functionality using blockchains given it's as easy as connecting an API.
Could social trading applications do the same? If they can build a critical mass of users the fastest by harnessing the speculative energy flowing through markets and their armies of creators pumping out content on socials, wouldn’t they then be well positioned to cross-sell those users on the safer stuff like tokenized securities and stablecoin-powered savings?
Making money comes in all shapes and forms after all. It doesn’t necessarily have to be trading related. It could be funding a promising startup through MetaDAO. It could be allocating to a high yield vault on Morpho. Again you just need a unique selling point that people can’t or struggle to find anywhere but onchain. It's not hard to imagine subcommunities emerging on these social platforms dedicated to discovering these opportunities.
But what’s easy in theory is often more nuanced in practice. While it's possible social trading apps’ younger audiences may not mind that their savings are in the same app as their speculative bets, we haven’t seen it play out historically. User behaviors are hard to change once the initial pathways have been established. It also doesn’t help that the brands “Fomo” and “Pump” don’t inspire sustainability. Nor does it that memecoins are intrinsically a zero sum game with thin liquidity that prevents copy trading at scale – negating a key value proposition of social trading in the first place.
Nevertheless the sector is still early with much of its product evolution ahead of it. Already we’re seeing teams in the sector start with perpetuals or prediction markets first instead of memecoins, forgoing the quick growth upfront for potentially more sustainable growth in the long-run.
In any case, only time will tell whether any of these can become more expansive social finance applications, or whether taking a bite out the apple of speculation dooms them to be expelled from the Garden of Eden.
In the meantime, leading blockchains and exchanges for memecoins, perpetual swaps, and more, will continue to serve as index exposure while all this experimentation runs its course. Most of this activity is funneling into a handful of venues with strong network effects. Social trading applications in effect are serving as their fastest-growing and most highly incentivized distribution channels.
So regardless who wins and what the end market structure looks like for these applications, what we can say with confidence is that they will drive enormous volumes to the underlying rails over the coming years.
In the process, we expect, they’ll help push blockchains mainstream, pulling users from the beige world of TradFi into the lush crypto frontier.
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