Why Are All of Your KOLs on Fomo?

When a trader you follow posts a Fomo link, what exactly are you being presented with?

Three things at once.

1. A place to trade: the link is a referral into Fomo's app.
2. A thesis: the trader's credibility and the social proof around the trade.
3. A trade: you can see what the trader holds and copy it in a tap.

Fomo is the clearest case of "social first trading", the label it uses for itself. In practice, Fomo sells a bundle: a trading venue, a way to explore trading theses, and a mechanism to copy others' trades.

In social trading, bundling is the only model that has scaled so far. eToro's CopyTrader and the copy-trading products of Bybit and Bitget all tie the trader, the trade and the venue together. Fomo is the newest of them, and on Hyperliquid the biggest.

Fomo made its name trading memecoins and came to perps late. Even so, in the 30 days to 14 October 2026 its builder code routed $3.2b of Hyperliquid volume. That is more than any other named builder, and 13% of the volume across the 120 builders Centaur tracks.

Fomo routes more Hyperliquid volume than any other builder. Source: HyperTracker via Centaur's Hyperliquid builders dashboard, 30 days to 14 October 2026.

Fomo is winning despite above-median fees, high slippage and low trader win rates, on the strength of its product and its distribution among trading influencers. Of the almost 300 traders Centaur tracks, 92 are affiliated with a venue, and Fomo is the most common: 18 of them link to it, ahead of Bybit (11) and Variational (8).

Fomo has signed more tracked traders than any other venue. Source: Centaur trader monetization dashboard, 293 tracked traders, as of 20 October 2026.

To see why the bundle works, and where it breaks, it helps to start with how trading influencers monetize their audience.

Six stages of the stack

Influencers monetize across six stages:

1. Venue recommendation. Tell followers where to trade: referral links, affiliate deals, sponsorships. 95 traders in the study.
2. Thesis expression. Sell the reasoning before the trade: paid X subscriptions, newsletters, research services. 106 traders.
3. Trade sharing. Share the trade itself: trade-sharing apps such as Fomo and Legend, and paid trade groups. 37 traders.
4. Trade management. Run the trade inside the follower's account: copy-trading and auto-invest products such as Autopilot and Plutus. 10 traders.
5. Money management. Run a fund and manage outside capital directly. 19 traders.
6. Venue ownership. Own the exchange, app or terminal that followers trade on. 9 traders.

Influencers monetize at six stages of the stack. Source: Centaur trader monetization dashboard, 293 tracked traders, as of 20 October 2026.

Of the 197 traders in the study who monetize, 135 (69%) use a single stage. Fomo's pitch is that one link covers three: the venue, the thesis and the trade.

The case for the bundle

The bundle solves real problems.

• It removes friction. A thesis on X is a screenshot or a link. A thesis inside the venue is a button. Every step between reading an idea and holding the position generates friction, and the bundle removes the steps in between.
• It attributes volume exactly. Every fill carries a code, so the venue knows which trader brought which volume, and pays for it. Fomo's referral program pays the referrer 25% of the trading fees their invitees pay, for as long as they trade. Since late August, Creator Rewards add a second stream: creators earn a share of the fees generated by people who trade through their posts and trades, paid in real time. No one argues about which post drove which trade.
• It attributes trades to traders exactly. On Fomo, a trader's positions are the trader's wallet. Followers see what the trader actually holds, so copying a trade is a tap rather than a guess.

The numbers above say the design works. Fomo routes more Hyperliquid volume than any other builder and has signed more of the traders Centaur tracks than any other venue. Judged on its own goal, fewer clicks and more volume, the bundle is winning.

Where the bundle breaks

Every product decision has a cost. Someone ends up paying for it.

• You pick the venue for discovery, not execution. Traders normally choose a venue for execution: price, fees, slippage, the trading screen. Fomo flips the order. It wins on convenient discovery, the theses and trades in its feed, and those are strong enough to outweigh its execution gaps when a follower chooses where to trade. Those gaps are real.
• Convenience is not the best discovery. A bundle maximizes the value of the product as a whole, so it is not necessarily the best at any one part of it. The strongest theses may sit in a handful of paid Substacks, or with traders who never post on Fomo. Few followers have the time to find those sources, judge them, and then trade on them at the venue they prefer. The bundle saves that work by narrowing the menu to what is inside the app. The bundle is convenient, and it maximizes neither execution nor discovery.
• Creator Rewards make the incentive explicit. Fomo paid creators $15m in September, a substantial share of all fees generated. Fomo pays for volume, so theses and trades are written to be traded. It is the same incentive misalignment X faces. X pays for engagement, so posts are written to be shared. Neither pays for being right.

Centaur's view is that the next model pays for skill, measured as a scored track record, and everything in its data points that way.

The record test

This is the question the bundle cannot answer: is the follower being sold real skill?

It is not surprising that of the 10 Fomo-affiliated traders with 20+ scored trades, 6 land in the bottom third by Sharpe ratio and only 1 in the top third. Traders with other venue ties spread almost evenly: 32% bottom, 41% middle, 27% top. Ten traders is a small sample, so this is only an indication, but it fits the reasoning: a venue that pays per fill has no direct reason to select for traders who are right.

6 of 10 Fomo-affiliated traders sit in the bottom third by track record. Source: Centaur scored calls opened 20 October 2025 to 20 October 2026, at the 30-day horizon; 145 traders with 20+ scored calls; venue ties from Centaur's trader monetization dashboard.

Unbundling

Centaur does not argue that unbundling is always better. Fomo's bundle of influencer distribution and trading has been highly successful. But the conditions behind it, a top-tier product and the largest roster of signed influencers, are hard for other trading apps to recreate.

That is where Centaur comes in. Its vision is to separate the thesis and the trade from any one venue, so that the world's best trading ideas are judged on their own record, wherever they are posted.

Centaur tracks and scores the theses and calls of the world's most influential traders wherever they are made, in posts on X and Telegram, across crypto, stocks, indices, commodities and FX. Once a call is scored and brought into a trading app's UI or an AI agent's toolkit, the follower can trade wherever execution is best.

This answers the bundle's strongest argument, friction. Unbundling does not send the follower back to screenshots and copy-paste. The scored call is delivered inside the app or agent the follower already trades with, so it stays one tap from execution. What changes is who picks the venue: the follower, not the influencer's affiliate deal.

That changes the incentive at every level of the stack:

• Venue: venues compete on UI, execution and fees, not on which influencers are signed.
• Thesis: research earns its price from a public record, not a follower count.
• Trade: a shared trade can be copied on any venue, not only inside the app that hosts it.

Unbundled, every stage competes on merit. Source: Centaur.

A bundle sells volume. The scarcer product is the right call: found wherever it is made, scored before it is followed, and executed wherever execution is best.

That is what Centaur is building.

Notes on the data

• Trader monetization: Centaur's trader monetization dashboard, 293 tracked traders from X and Telegram, as of 20 October 2026. A trader can monetize at several stages. Sponsorships count as venue affiliations.
• Hyperliquid builders: HyperTracker builder analytics via Centaur's Hyperliquid builders dashboard, 30 days to 14 October 2026, 120 named builders with over $1m in 30-day volume. Trader PnL is volume-attributed and net of fees.
• Track record: Centaur scored calls opened 20 October 2025 to 20 October 2026, each scored 30 days after it was opened. Includes traders with at least 20 scored calls and at least half of their sampled calls scored (145 traders, 85 of them crypto). Thirds are by 30-day Sharpe ratio within each asset class. Paid research means a paid X subscription, paid newsletter, research platform or own research service.
• Fomo perps fees: builder fee of 0.05% per side, on top of Hyperliquid's taker fee of about 0.045% (Datawallet, updated 17 August 2026). Effective builder fees (4.6 bps for Fomo, 3.8 bps median) are fees over volume from Centaur's Hyperliquid builders dashboard, 30 days to 14 October 2026.
• Fomo referral terms: Fomo help center, How referral codes and fee discounts work, accessed 20 October 2026. The article covers trading fees in general and does not say whether perps are included.
• Caveats: the record test rests on small groups (48 traders per third across all 145 traders, 28 per third for the 85 crypto traders, and 10 Fomo-affiliated traders), and correlation is not causation. Traders with large audiences are more likely to be tracked.