Vector, the on-chain social trading app built around real-time feeds and one-tap execution, reached more than $20 million in peak daily trading volume and roughly $1 billion in cumulative volume before its sale at the end of 2025, according to its founder. The company’s trajectory shows how quickly attention-driven trading products can scale during meme coin booms—and how difficult it can be to keep a broad retail audience engaged once speculative activity cools.
The founder said Vector’s daily volume rose from about $1 million shortly after its late-November 2024 launch to more than $20 million by late January 2025. That surge coincided with the release of Trump-themed meme coins, which drove a burst of on-chain activity and gave social trading apps a steady flow of charts, trade signals, and rapidly moving assets to display.
Vector was acquired by Coinbase at the end of 2025, the founder said. The account did not disclose the purchase price or the terms of the transaction.
a social feed built around execution
Vector’s central product idea was to make trading feel closer to browsing a social platform. Instead of opening to a conventional market screen, users saw a feed of real-time charts with buy and sell activity overlaid directly on price movements. User avatars were attached to those markers, allowing viewers to connect a trade with an identifiable account and react quickly.
The intended path was short: a user could see a trade, assess the chart, and place an order within seconds. The team’s longer-term goal was to reduce that interval toward milliseconds, reflecting the speed at which meme coin liquidity and online attention can shift.
The founder traced the concept to earlier work in Solana NFT markets through Tensor. During its strongest period, Tensor held more than 80% of its market segment and processed billions of dollars in trading volume, according to the founder. That experience suggested that visible trading behavior, rankings, and activity feeds could become part of the product rather than merely a source of market data.
Vector initially explored that model in the NFT market before moving toward meme coins. The team viewed meme coins as a practical entry point for social trading because their prices are often driven by fast-moving narratives, community activity, and public signals rather than slower fundamental analysis.
retention held up during the growth phase
The app’s early growth was accompanied by retention levels that would be strong for a consumer trading product, though the figures were recalled from memory rather than presented as audited data. The founder estimated that 60% to 70% of users remained active after seven days, while 40% to 50% remained after 30 days.
Vector reached that scale with fewer than 25 employees, according to the founder. A small team can move quickly during an emerging market cycle, but it also faces difficult product choices when user behavior changes. In Vector’s case, the user base increasingly split between casual users drawn by viral token launches and a smaller group of highly active traders generating most of the activity.
As meme coin trading slowed, approximately 5% of Vector users accounted for about 95% of volume, the founder said. That concentration altered the company’s product priorities. The team began building for professional traders who needed deeper data, larger workspaces, and more sophisticated execution tools than a mobile-first social feed could provide.
A desktop product was developed for multi-screen and high-frequency trading workflows, but it was never publicly released. The shift illustrated a recurring tension in on-chain trading products: the audience that creates the most visible social activity is not always the audience producing most of the revenue-generating volume.
fomo targets audiences beyond crypto-native circles
The founder described rival app fomo as taking a different route to growth. Rather than relying primarily on crypto-native social networks, fomo sought users through mainstream platforms including TikTok and Instagram, reaching people who had not previously traded on-chain assets.
That approach required a product designed for first-time users, particularly people unfamiliar with wallets, token discovery, transaction signing, and the speed of decentralized markets. The founder said fomo combined those acquisition channels with simpler onboarding and later expanded beyond meme coins into perpetual futures.
Fomo has reported daily trading volume above $100 million, according to the founder’s account. Index Ventures led a $75 million funding round for the company in late July 2026, and fomo had surpassed $4 billion in cumulative user volume by that point, according to the supplied information.
Its move into perpetuals places it in a more demanding market than meme coin spot trading. Perpetual futures allow traders to take leveraged long or short positions without an expiry date, creating demand for clearer risk controls, deeper liquidity, and more robust market data. A social interface can help users discover trades, but it also raises the stakes when inexperienced users encounter leverage.
The rise of these products has divided on-chain trading design into two increasingly distinct tracks. Casual users want simple mobile access, rapid discovery, and familiar social interfaces. Heavy users are more likely to require desktop layouts, advanced charting, order management, and execution tools built for continuous monitoring.
Vector’s rise and eventual sale show that social trading can generate substantial volume during periods of intense retail attention. Its later pivot also suggests that sustaining the model depends less on reproducing a social feed than on deciding which users the product is ultimately built to serve.
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