GM and happy Thursday!

As equities remain volatile, BTC lags on the upside amidst anemic ETF flows. There’s always a bull market somewhere, and right now it’s in the onchain trading of tokenized assets. 

Below we discuss fomo's run to an $87.7M annualized pace, and the harder question underneath it: does social trading have a moat, or is it the next thing an everything-exchange buys and shuts down?

Equities rallied hard off of last week’s lows while the S&P 500 cleared a new all-time high. Unfortunately, BTC’s downside alpha exhibited during last week’s equity selloff did not transfer to the upside, as the asset remains rangebound and lags the recent strength in other risk assets. While strength didn’t transfer on the upside, BTC still shows relative strength to equities on downside moves, as BTC traded up 0.8% on the day while the Nasdaq and S&P 500 traded down -0.9% and -0.2% respectively.

Gold led the board over the past 24 hours, up 5% on the day, while crypto miners were the top losers, down -6.2%. CIFR and HUT led miners to the downside, with each having reported earnings this week and missing estimates.  

Net flows in crypto ETFs remain anemic, with no strong signal to the upside or downside. Activity here reflects disinterest, a distinct net flows environment from the significant selling shown during the May and June period. The start of a new bull will be reflected in sustained inflows into these vehicles, which isn’t yet the current context. 

Fortunately, there’s always a bull market somewhere, and it’s not too hard to spot. As crypto assets get smoked YTD, the next best things to trade are opportunities in the RWA set. Onchain volumes in RWAs reflect this across both spot and perps. Aggregate notional volume in perpetual futures for RWAs continues to climb, hitting a new all-time of $150B in July, posting its 3rd consecutive month of growth and up from $1.3B this time a year ago. 

Spot volume in tokenized assets tells a similar story. Last month, this category cleared $14B in volume, a new all-time high and up from $3.375B this time a year ago. 

There's a signal in the sectors that continue to compound amidst a negative backdrop, and onchain trading of RWAs shows this. While it took this sector longer than many would have thought to find its legs, RWAs are up on their feet and running.   

— Luke

Social Trading's Moat Problem

Fomo has become one of the standout consumer products of this cycle. Weekly revenue climbed from ~$150K in late 2025 to $1.88M for the week ending August 2nd, putting the app on an $87.7M annualized pace against $7.21M in trailing 30-day revenue. Those numbers helped fomo surpass every trading app by weekly revenue on any chain. The more useful question for us is not how fast the line went up, but what a social trading app has to own for the line to hold.

fomo's founders came out of dYdX and built for the friction rather than the primitive. Apple Pay onboarding, gasless swaps, and a self-custodial wallet let a first-time buyer trade in seconds, and the team reports 68K users made their first crypto purchase this way. On top of that are a social feed and copytrading leaderboards that collapse the distance between watching a trade and taking it. fomo routes spot flow to Solana DEXs, perps to Hyperliquid through builder codes, and cross-chain orders through Relay, the same rails Phantom and MetaMask tap. The product is the front end and the graph, not the matching engine.

That distinction is the whole game, and Vector already ran the experiment. Vector.fun, built by Tensor Labs, pioneered Solana SocialFi with broadcast trades, copytrading, and local leaderboards, clearing roughly $5M in fees inside three months. In November, Coinbase bought it as its ninth acquisition of the year, hired the team into its onchain division, and shut the apps down inside a week. Social trading proved valuable enough for the largest US exchange to buy, and yet Coinbase took the team and the tech, then folded them into an "everything exchange" instead of keeping the consumer product alive. 

So we keep returning to the moat. If execution is rented and the rails are shared, fomo's defensibility rests on two things: 

1. A consumer brand that turns an Apple Pay tap into a first trade

2. A social graph that gets stickier as followers, copied traders, and leaderboard reputations accumulate. 

The bull case is Robinhood's, where distribution plus habit compounds into a front end with real switching costs. The bear case is Vector's, where a larger distributor with its own wallet, from Coinbase to Phantom, bolts a feed and a copytrade button onto the same DEXs, and the social-first app becomes a feature rather than a company. 

A cyclicality flag sits on the revenue itself. Solana spot is the dominant fee source, and Hyperliquid perps contributed only about 1.7% of trailing-week revenue, so most of the uptrend rides memecoin velocity rather than a diversified book. Perps and tokenized equities are the stated path to durable fees, and the June perps launch for non-US users is the first step down it.

For now, fomo is the clearest evidence that social trading is a real consumer category, and the open question for the next twelve months is whether the winner is an independent app that owns the graph or whether the graph ends up owned by whoever already owns the user.

— Nick

Umbra's Decision Market Rejected a $1.5M Treasury Attack

01Resolved finds that Umbra's decision market successfully blocked a proposal that sought to extract roughly $1.5 million, or 62% of the DAO's treasury, even though the attacker spent only about $4,600 to attempt it. A single wallet accumulated the required governance stake, opened the proposal, and tried to influence the outcome through thin conditional markets, but coordinated opposition from several traders reversed the market during the TWAP window and caused the proposal to fail. The report argues this exposed a structural weakness in low liquidity decision markets, where the cost of launching an attack can be small relative to the potential reward, and recommends measures such as longer stake lockups, dynamic approval thresholds, and deeper liquidity for treasury related proposals.

Beyond Accrual: The Three Variables that Actually Price Token Value

This article by YashasEdu argues that value-accrual mechanisms and revenue are only initial filters for token quality, while long-term value depends more on durable free cash flow, net dilution after emissions and unlocks, and how much economic value the token captures. These variables interact: strong revenue persistence can offset some dilution, while high capture rates or low dilution cannot rescue a protocol with weak demand or deteriorating economics. Investors should therefore exclude governance-only tokens, stress-test revenue durability, model supply changes over the next 6–24 months, assess token capture, and only then apply a valuation methodology.