Morning Minute: Fomo’s $75M Raise Shows Big VCs Are Still Betting on Consumer Crypto

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GM!

Today’s top news:

• Crypto majors fall 3-7% as stocks sell off; BTC at $62.3k
• Saylor raises $300M in cash; MSTR falls 5%
• Fomo app raises $75M at $550M valuation as they expand into everything app
• Bitmine, Sharplink and others team up for new R&D project ETHLabs
• Trump signs executive orders accelerating U.S. quantum development

📈 Fomo Raises $75M at a $550M Valuation as Big VCs Bet on Consumer Crypto

A consumer crypto trading app just pulled in $75 million from investors who normally steer clear of crypto entirely.

Fomo, a social-first crypto trading app, raised a $75 million Series B led by Index Ventures at a $550 million valuation. Union Square Ventures joined, along with existing backer Benchmark and angels including Zynga’s Mark Pincus, Discord CEO Humam Sakhnini, and Eventbrite’s Kevin Hartz. Founded in 2025 by three former dYdX employees, Paul Erlanger, Se Yong Park, and Prashan Dharmasena, Fomo is built to make onchain trading feel like a normal consumer app: non-custodial, roughly 30-second onboarding, social features like leaderboards and copy trading, and access to more assets than Coinbase across multiple chains without managing wallets, bridges, or gas. Since launching in May 2025 it has crossed 625,000 users and $4 billion in trading volume, is adding around 3,500 users a day, and runs all of it on a team of 17. The round brings total funding to about $94 million.

Index partner Julia Andre said the firm sees a real market shift in consumer blockchain trading and a team that can capture it, putting it plainly that “we’re not doing Fomo because it’s a crypto business.” Co-founder Paul Erlanger was blunt about the problem they’re attacking: “Onchain trading is just impossible.” His goal is for Fomo to not read as a crypto app at all, the same path Coinbase and Robinhood are walking.

There is signal here in who’s writing the check. Index made its name on Figma and Scale AI, and Union Square Ventures rarely touches crypto. Established, non-crypto VCs leading a nine-figure raise for a crypto startup in the middle of a brutal down market is a high-conviction bet that the next wave of users arrives through a clean consumer app, not a clunky exchange. The timing fits too, with retail search and trading volume ticking back up as Bitcoin steadies near $64,000.

And Fomo’s ambition runs past tokens. It added perps in June and wants to be the front end for equities, derivatives, and prediction markets as they move onchain, which puts it on a direct collision course with Coinbase’s “everything app” and Robinhood. Co-founder Se commented how they plan to make acquisitions and build the engineering team with the new funds. They certainly have the warchest to make it happen now…

₿ Strategy Raises $300M in Cash and Buys Just 520 BTC

Strategy sold $335.5 million of MSTR stock last week but spent almost none of it on Bitcoin, buying just 520 BTC (~$35M) at an average of $67,068 to bring its stack to 847,363 coins. The rest went to cash.

Strategy increased its USD reserve by roughly $300 million to $1.4 billion, money set aside to support the credit quality of its preferred shares and cover dividends and debt.

Some are calling this damage control for STRC. Saylor’s dividend-paying preferred stock, the engine he’s used to fund Bitcoin buys, fell to a record low of $83 last week before clawing back, and the selloff dragged down Bitcoin and rattled sentiment across the market. By raising common equity and stockpiling cash instead of buying more Bitcoin, Strategy is signaling that shoring up its balance sheet matters more right now than adding coins.

Strategy’s CEO even bought $1 million of STRC himself and said he’ll hold it until it returns to par, a public show of confidence as critics question whether the model holds up in a prolonged bear market.

So it’s becoming clear Saylor and Co are going to protect STRC and Bitcoin. And that likely means “sacrificing” MSTR (MSTR fell 3% on Monday while IBIT jumped 2.5%). Concerns of Saylor blowing up are likely exaggerated, but MSTR shareholders are likely in for more near-term pain…

🔬 BitMine, SharpLink, and Joe Lubin Fund a New Ethereum Research Lab

The two biggest ETH treasury companies just put money behind Ethereum’s research itself.

BitMine, SharpLink, and Joe Lubin are the primary backers of ETHLabs, a new independent nonprofit R&D lab staffed by five researchers who came out of the Ethereum Foundation.

ETHLabs’ stated goal is to make Ethereum the settlement layer of the global economy, and its early work is aimed squarely at institutions: faster settlement, native issuance, cross-chain movement, more mainnet capacity, and research grounding ETH’s monetary properties. Beyond the three anchor funders, community backers include Uniswap’s Hayden Adams, Base’s Jesse Pollak, and researchers Justin Drake, Danny Ryan, and Tim Beiko.

BitMine and SharpLink are the two largest corporate holders of ETH, so the players with the most ETH on their balance sheets are now bankrolling the research meant to make ETH more valuable. Tom Lee framed it around institutions and AI agents driving adoption and the ecosystem needing more talent and research to support it. ETHLabs is also explicitly targeting value accrual and DeFi’s real-world traction, the exact areas ETH holders have long argued the Foundation underweights in the name of credible neutrality. To keep that money from looking like influence, ETHLabs routes every contribution through an independent grants administrator, putting a buffer between the researchers and the treasuries paying the bills.

This arrives during an Ethereum Foundation talent exodus and a louder fight over who steers Ethereum’s direction and how ETH the asset captures value. ETHLabs is being pitched as complementary to the Foundation rather than a breakaway, framed as two halves of a whole, idealism and pragmatism. The bet is simple: align the institutions that own the most ETH with the researchers who can grow it, and let an independent administrator keep everyone honest.

🌎 Macro Crypto and Markets

• Crypto majors are very red this morning alongside stocks; BTC -3% at $62.3k; ETH -6% at $1,660; SOL -7% at $69.10; HYPE -7% at $63
• DEXE (+35%), HASH (+15%) and RAIN (+9%) led top movers
• Oil -3% at $73.80; Gold -1.5% at $4,140
• Stock futures are very red as big Tech sells off; DOW -0.5%, Nasdaq -2.75%
• The U.S. Senate passed a housing bill carrying a four-year ban on a Fed CBDC, a win for crypto advocates who oppose a government-issued digital dollar on surveillance grounds
• OKX and the NYSE formed a joint venture led by Andrew Cuomo to bridge traditional and crypto markets, aiming to give OKX’s 120 million users access to ICE futures and NYSE tokenized equities
• Trump signed two executive orders accelerating U.S. quantum computing and the shift to quantum-resistant encryption ahead of “Q-Day,” a push that also underscores the long-term threat quantum poses to Bitcoin’s cryptography
• MoneyGram joined Solana as a validator, deepening its push into stablecoin payments by helping secure the network it’s increasingly building on
• Bitcoin OG Adam Back has made a bet that Bitcoin will make it to $500k-$1M by 2028 and believes its market cap will eventually catch gold

Corporate Treasuries & ETFs

Meme Coin Tracker

• Meme leaders were very red; DOGE -6%, SHIB -3%, PEPE -5%, PENGU -7%, TRUMP -8%, BONK -6%
• FARM (+75%) and GTA6 (+240%) led movers on Solana
• Base movers included PRVXT (+60%) and SYND (+60%)

📈 Myriad Market of the Day

💰 Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker

🚚 What is happening in NFTs?

• NFT leaders were mostly red; Punks -1.5% at 30.5 ETH, BAYC -1% at 9.18 ETH, Pudgy -3% at 4.65 ETH; Hypurr’s -6% at 213 HYPE
• Cow’s (+56%), NPC (+22%) and Cyberkongz (+14%) led top movers