Morning Minute: Fomo's $75M Increase Reveals Massive VCs Are Nonetheless Betting on Client Crypto – Decrypt

Morning Minute is a every day e-newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The evaluation and opinions expressed are his personal and don’t essentially replicate these of Decrypt. And check out our new every day information present protecting all the prime tales in 5 minutes, downloadable on Apple Pod or Spotify.

GM!

In the present day’s prime information:

• Crypto majors fall 3-7% as shares dump; BTC at $62.3k
• Saylor raises $300M in money; MSTR falls 5%
• Fomo app raises $75M at $550M valuation as they increase into all the things app
• Bitmine, Sharplink and others staff up for brand new R&D venture ETHLabs
• Trump indicators govt orders accelerating U.S. quantum improvement

📈 Fomo Raises $75M at a $550M Valuation as Massive VCs Wager on Client Crypto

A client crypto buying and selling app simply pulled in $75 million from buyers who usually avoid crypto fully.

Fomo, a social-first crypto buying and selling app, raised a $75 million Sequence B led by Index Ventures at a $550 million valuation. Union Sq. Ventures joined, together with current backer Benchmark and angels together with Zynga’s Mark Pincus, Discord CEO Humam Sakhnini, and Eventbrite’s Kevin Hartz. Based in 2025 by three former dYdX staff, Paul Erlanger, Se Yong Park, and Prashan Dharmasena, Fomo is constructed to make onchain buying and selling really feel like a standard client app: non-custodial, roughly 30-second onboarding, social options like leaderboards and duplicate buying and selling, and entry to extra property than Coinbase throughout a number of chains with out managing wallets, bridges, or fuel. Since launching in Could 2025 it has crossed 625,000 customers and $4 billion in buying and selling quantity, is including round 3,500 customers a day, and runs all of it on a staff of 17. The spherical brings whole funding to about $94 million.

Index companion Julia Andre stated the agency sees an actual market shift in client blockchain buying and selling and a staff that may seize it, placing it plainly that “we’re not doing Fomo as a result of it’s a crypto enterprise.” Co-founder Paul Erlanger was blunt about the issue they’re attacking: “Onchain buying and selling is simply unimaginable.” His aim is for Fomo to not learn as a crypto app in any respect, the identical path Coinbase and Robinhood are strolling.

There’s sign right here in who’s writing the verify. Index made its title on Figma and Scale AI, and Union Sq. Ventures hardly ever touches crypto. Established, non-crypto VCs main a nine-figure elevate for a crypto startup in the course of a brutal down market is a high-conviction guess that the subsequent wave of customers arrives by means of a clear client app, not a clunky change. The timing matches too, with retail search and buying and selling quantity ticking again up as Bitcoin steadies close to $64,000.

And Fomo’s ambition runs previous tokens. It added perps in June and needs to be the entrance finish for equities, derivatives, and prediction markets as they transfer onchain, which places it on a direct collision course with Coinbase’s “all the things app” and Robinhood. Co-founder Se commented how they plan to make acquisitions and construct the engineering staff with the brand new funds. They definitely have the warchest to make it occur now…

₿ Technique Raises $300M in Money and Buys Simply 520 BTC

Technique offered $335.5 million of MSTR inventory final week however spent virtually none of it on Bitcoin, shopping for simply 520 BTC (~$35M) at a mean of $67,068 to deliver its stack to 847,363 cash. The remaining went to money.

Technique elevated its USD reserve by roughly $300 million to $1.4 billion, cash put aside to help the credit score high quality of its most popular shares and canopy dividends and debt.

Some are calling this harm management for STRC. Saylor’s dividend-paying most popular inventory, the engine he’s used to fund Bitcoin buys, fell to a file low of $83 final week earlier than clawing again, and the selloff dragged down Bitcoin and rattled sentiment throughout the market. By elevating widespread fairness and stockpiling money as a substitute of shopping for extra Bitcoin, Technique is signaling that shoring up its stability sheet issues extra proper now than including cash.

Technique’s CEO even purchased $1 million of STRC himself and stated he’ll maintain it till it returns to par, a public present of confidence as critics query whether or not the mannequin holds up in a protracted bear market.

So it’s turning into clear Saylor and Co are going to guard STRC and Bitcoin. And that seemingly means “sacrificing” MSTR (MSTR fell 3% on Monday whereas IBIT jumped 2.5%). Considerations of Saylor blowing up are seemingly exaggerated, however MSTR shareholders are seemingly in for extra near-term ache…

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

The 2 greatest ETH treasury corporations simply put cash behind Ethereum’s analysis itself.

BitMine, SharpLink, and Joe Lubin are the first backers of ETHLabs, a brand new unbiased nonprofit R&D lab staffed by 5 researchers who got here out of the Ethereum Basis.

ETHLabs’ acknowledged aim is to make Ethereum the settlement layer of the worldwide financial system, and its early work is aimed squarely at establishments: sooner settlement, native issuance, cross-chain motion, extra mainnet capability, and analysis grounding ETH’s financial properties. Past the three anchor funders, group backers embody Uniswap’s Hayden Adams, Base’s Jesse Pollak, and researchers Justin Drake, Danny Ryan, and Tim Beiko.

BitMine and SharpLink are the 2 largest company holders of ETH, so the gamers with probably the most ETH on their stability sheets at the moment are bankrolling the analysis meant to make ETH extra precious. Tom Lee framed it round establishments and AI brokers driving adoption and the ecosystem needing extra expertise and analysis to help it. ETHLabs can also be explicitly concentrating on worth accrual and DeFi’s real-world traction, the precise areas ETH holders have lengthy argued the Basis underweights within the title of credible neutrality. To maintain that cash from trying like affect, ETHLabs routes each contribution by means of an unbiased grants administrator, placing a buffer between the researchers and the treasuries paying the payments.

This arrives throughout an Ethereum Basis expertise exodus and a louder combat over who steers Ethereum’s path and the way ETH the asset captures worth. ETHLabs is being pitched as complementary to the Basis relatively than a breakaway, framed as two halves of an entire, idealism and pragmatism. The guess is easy: align the establishments that personal probably the most ETH with the researchers who can develop it, and let an unbiased administrator maintain everybody sincere.

🌎 Macro Crypto and Markets

• Crypto majors are very purple this morning alongside shares; 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 prime movers
• Oil -3% at $73.80; Gold -1.5% at $4,140
• Inventory futures are very purple as huge Tech sells off; DOW -0.5%, Nasdaq -2.75%
• The U.S. Senate handed a housing invoice carrying a four-year ban on a Fed CBDC, a win for crypto advocates who oppose a government-issued digital greenback on surveillance grounds
• OKX and the NYSE shaped a three way partnership led by Andrew Cuomo to bridge conventional and crypto markets, aiming to provide OKX’s 120 million customers entry to ICE futures and NYSE tokenized equities
• Trump signed two govt orders accelerating U.S. quantum computing and the shift to quantum-resistant encryption forward of “Q-Day,” a push that additionally underscores the long-term risk quantum poses to Bitcoin’s cryptography
• MoneyGram joined Solana as a validator, deepening its push into stablecoin funds by serving to safe the community it’s more and more constructing on
• Bitcoin OG Adam Again has made a guess that Bitcoin will make it to $500k-$1M by 2028 and believes its market cap will ultimately catch gold

Company Treasuries & ETFs

Meme Coin Tracker

• Meme leaders had been very purple; 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 going on in NFTs?

• NFT leaders had been principally purple; 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 prime movers