The October 8 liquidation day — $1.16 billion in longs wiped out in 24 hours — was exactly the kind of afternoon where a trading app either holds or folds. On FOMO App, at least one user said it folded at the worst possible moment: a trader wrote on X that they were up 2x when selling “kept crashing,” ending the session wiped out (post, October 8).
It is a single public report, not a confirmed outage — and the distinction matters. But it lands on an app that has grown fast enough that its reliability is now market-wide news.
What the monitors show
Status trackers did not back up a broader failure: IsDown.app showed Fomo working normally with zero user reports in the 24 hours before October 7, and Entireweb’s status page reported normal operation as of October 2. At the same time, complaints about failed sells and laggy exits have trailed the app across the App Store, Trustpilot, X and Reddit for much of its life — persistent enough to be a pattern, scattered enough to never amount to a confirmed October outage.
Inside FOMO App’s growth story
The New York-based, self-custodial social trading app (fomo.family) was founded in 2024 by Paul Erlanger, Se Yong Park and Prashan Dharmasena. In June 2026 it closed a $75 million Series B led by Index Ventures at a $550 million valuation, with Union Square Ventures and existing backer Benchmark participating, bringing total disclosed funding to roughly $94 million after Benchmark’s $17 million Series A.
The metrics behind that raise: 600,000+ users, over $4 billion in cumulative trading volume, 110 million social interactions and 68,000 verified traders. Perpetuals went live the same month, powered by Hyperliquid and trade.xyz, spanning equities, pre-IPO, crypto, indices and commodities from a single app, with plans to expand further into equities and prediction markets. Supported chains now include Solana, Base, BNB Chain, Ethereum, Monad and Robinhood Chain, and Google Play logs an app update dated September 29.
Trust, but verify your sell button
FOMO App’s history includes harder questions than a crash complaint. In June 2025, an alleged iOS exploit following a “small bug fix” update was reported to have caused around $6 million in user losses, including one account’s 662 SOL (~$62,000); co-founder Prashan Dharmasena denied responsibility, citing the app’s self-custodial architecture, per Protos reporting.
That is the honest tension of social trading apps: self-custody protects your keys, not your exit. On days when $1.16 billion evaporates in hours, the only chart pattern that matters is whether the sell button answers. A small test sell before committing size — on any app — is cheap insurance.
