Original Title: Why Social Trading Is The New Financial Infrastructure Layer
Original Author: Boaz Sobrado, Forbes
Translator: Peggy, BlockBeats

Editor’s Note:

From the retail trading wave ignited by GameStop to Robinhood's vision of a "financial super app," social trading is evolving from a fringe phenomenon into a part of financial infrastructure. They do not replace brokerages but build a new layer of discovery and discussion on top of them.

This article delves into how emerging platforms like Blossom, AfterHour, and Fomo are reshaping the behavior paths and market structures of retail investors through real holding data, community interaction, and trading integration. In this process of gradually forming infrastructure, those who understand their users will define the future financial entry points.

The following is the original text:

On January 23, 2025, Achi, the dog from the famous "dogwifhat" meme, appeared at the opening bell ceremony of the New York Stock Exchange.
Dogwifhat (token code WIF) is a dog-themed meme coin based on Solana, launched in November 2023, with a mascot that is a Shiba Inu wearing a knitted hat.

When Benchmark led Fomo's $17 million Series A funding round in November 2025, this selective Silicon Valley venture capital firm made an unusual bet in the crypto space. Benchmark rarely invests in cryptocurrency startups. The firm had previously invested in Chainalysis in 2018 and a few other projects, but the crypto space was still not part of its typical portfolio.

However, partner Chetan Puttagunta joined Fomo's board. Fomo is a consumer-facing application that supports trading millions of crypto tokens across multiple blockchains.

Benchmark is not investing in another trading app but in social trading infrastructure—a category that is rapidly becoming an indispensable tool for retail investors, as important as traditional brokerages.

Not Just Degen: A Case Study of Blossom Social

The Blossom team and community members pose in front of the Nasdaq building.

Blossom's CEO Maxwell Nicholson has a deeper understanding of "friction" than most.

When building a social platform, forcing users to link their brokerage accounts from the start often creates significant resistance at the beginning of the user journey. Most consumer products would choose to remove this barrier, but Blossom did the opposite and made it a requirement.

This decision seems illogical at first until you understand what Nicholson wants to build.

Blossom launched in 2021, right at the peak of the retail trading frenzy sparked by GameStop. At that time, discussions about stocks on Reddit were mostly anonymous—you couldn't see real holdings, only various opinions. While StockTwits has many users, most of the shared content is unverified.

Nicholson wanted to create a social network based on real investment behavior. Through APIs like SnapTrade, Blossom can connect brokerage accounts and verify user holdings. This technology is already mature; the question is whether users are willing to endure this "friction."

The result is: they are willing.

Today, Blossom has 500,000 registered users, with about 100,000 having linked their brokerage accounts, representing nearly $4 billion in assets. On the platform, about half of the holdings are ETFs rather than individual stocks, with the most popular being the S&P 500 Index ETF.

The mandatory account linking shapes the platform's culture.

Nicholson observed that while StockTwits later added a brokerage linking feature, it was optional. Technically, anyone can connect through Plaid or SnapTrade, but since linking is not part of the platform's core culture, users have not widely adopted it. On Blossom, almost all active users share their real holdings and earn badges through verification. This "friction" filters out those willing to publicly disclose their portfolios, creating a unique community atmosphere.

This culture ultimately translates into a business model.

Blossom achieved $300,000 in revenue in 2023, reaching $1.1 million in 2024, and is expected to surpass $4 million this year, with 75% coming from partnerships with ETF issuers.

State Street pays Blossom to enhance the awareness of SPY among retail investors, preventing them from defaulting to Vanguard's VOO. VanEck promotes thematic ETFs, and Global X markets its specialty funds. Currently, about 25 issuers are collaborating with Blossom because this platform can accurately reach retail investors who are actively choosing funds.

This model is effective because Blossom's users are not day traders but are building portfolios for the next few decades. When they link accounts and discuss holdings, they not only create content for other users but also generate data on real retail behavior.

Nicholson introduced Blossom's quarterly ETF retail fund flow report. This data shows how users actually use their funds, rather than what they claim in surveys. Since the data is verified through brokerage accounts, it has high credibility and thus commercial value. ETF issuers are willing to pay for this data to understand whether their products truly attract retail investors.

These $4 billion in linked assets represent real funds making real asset allocation decisions based on discussions on the social platform.

Retail Investors Dominate the World, But Which Type of Retail Investors?

Notable investor Kevin Xu on Reddit is the founder of AfterHour and Alpha Ai.

The explosion of social trading reveals a fact: retail investors are not a homogeneous group. The platforms that truly succeed in this space serve distinctly different user groups—each with different risk appetites, investment horizons, and motivations.

AfterHour targets the WallStreetBets community. Founder Kevin Xu publicly shared every trade on WallStreetBets under the alias "Sir Jack" during the meme stock craze, turning $35,000 into $8 million. He created AfterHour to serve this type of user. The platform allows users to share holdings anonymously but requires linking a brokerage account for verification. Users share specific amounts rather than percentages. The atmosphere in the stock chat room is more like a trading version of Twitch live streaming.

In June 2024, AfterHour secured $4.5 million in funding from Founders Fund and General Catalyst. The platform is extremely popular, with reportedly 70% of users opening the app daily. They are not passive investors checking reports quarterly but active participants treating the market as entertainment and community. The platform has pushed nearly 6 million trading signals to users, with verified holding assets exceeding $500 million.

Fomo, on the other hand, targets the "Degen" in the crypto space. This group wants to trade any token on any blockchain. The founding team of Fomo listed 200 ideal angel investors and secured introductions through connections, ultimately attracting 140 of them, including Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron, Solana co-founder Raj Gokal, and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan.

The team behind Fomo, who recently received investment from Benchmark.

Benchmark's investment in Fomo came after three different people recommended Fomo's two founders, Paul Erlanger and Se Yong Park, to partner Chetan Puttagunta. They had previously worked together at dYdX and firmly believed in Fomo's vision: to create a super app that allows users to trade all crypto assets on any blockchain while embedding social features to track friends and KOLs' trades in real-time.

Fomo targets users who want to trade anytime and anywhere, from Bitcoin to obscure meme coins. The app charges a 0.5% trading fee but absorbs on-chain gas fees, which is very attractive to users focused on mainstream coins. For example, you can trade Solana tokens at 3 AM on a Sunday without worrying about network fees—traditional market "friction" is particularly evident here.

In June 2025, Fomo integrated with Apple Pay, allowing users to start trading immediately after downloading the app. The platform's revenue quickly grew to $150,000 per week, with daily trading volume reaching $3 million. By the time the funding round closed in September, daily trading volume had reached $20 million to $40 million, with daily revenue of $150,000 and over 120,000 users.

This wave of growth validates Puttagunta's judgment: social trading is no longer just a feature but a new layer of infrastructure. These platforms are building a long-term framework for retail investors to discover, discuss, and execute trades.

Blossom aims to attract long-term investors. Users on the platform discuss whether to tilt their portfolios towards small-cap value stocks or international markets. About 37% of holdings are in the S&P 500 ETF, while the remaining 63% includes dividend funds, covered call ETFs, crypto ETFs, fixed income products, and individual stock ETFs. Users generally adopt a "core-satellite" strategy: building a broad market base while allocating around specific themes.

The user groups served by these platforms are distinctly different.

Users discussing the SCHD dividend yield on Blossom and those trading Trump meme coins on Fomo at midnight are clearly not the same type of people. They are both retail investors, but their goals, risk preferences, and attitudes towards the market differ.

The success of the platforms lies in their precise audience selection.

Blossom's mandatory brokerage account linking filters out serious investors willing to share their real holdings; AfterHour's anonymous transparency mechanism attracts traders who want to build credibility but do not wish to reveal their identities; Fomo's multiple link-ins serve crypto natives accustomed to trading around the clock. In theory, these platforms could serve all retail investors, but they have chosen not to do so.

The Logic of Financial Super Apps

On July 29, 2021, online brokerage Robinhood went public on the New York Stock Exchange.
On that day, founders Baiju Bhatt and Vlad Tenev appeared on Wall Street, and Robinhood's stock price fell about 5% in its first day of trading on Nasdaq.

In September 2025, Robinhood announced the launch of "Robinhood Social," validating the trend of social trading from an unexpected direction. When the platform that once "commoditized" trading commissions began to add social features, it indicated that the underlying logic of the entire brokerage industry was changing.

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev stated at an offline event in Las Vegas, "Robinhood is no longer just a trading platform; it is your financial super app."

This release includes AI-driven custom indicators, futures trading, short-selling mechanisms, overnight index options, and support for multiple independent brokerage accounts. But the core update is Robinhood Social—a trading community embedded within the app that supports real trade verification and real-name profiles.

These features almost replicate the core experience of independent social trading platforms: users can view entry and exit points in real-time, discuss strategies, follow other traders, and execute trades directly within the information stream. They can see their annual profit and loss, daily returns, and historical trading records. Each profile is KYC-verified to ensure they are real users. Users can even follow politicians, insiders, and hedge funds based on publicly disclosed trading records, even if these individuals are not active on Robinhood.

Robinhood has set the social features to "invite-only," indicating their awareness of the importance of this space. The platform has 24 million funded accounts, providing strong distribution capabilities. It once led the zero-commission trading movement and has long defended the "payment for order flow" profit model. Now, it is beginning to lay out the social layer because brokerages themselves also face the risk of "commoditization."

Zero commissions have become the industry standard, mobile experience is a basic requirement, and fractional trading has become widespread. Robinhood's differentiated advantage in 2015 can now be found on Charles Schwab, Fidelity, and TD Ameritrade. The next round of competition will focus on "community" and "dialogue."

Robinhood's actions prove that social trading is not an added feature but a layer of infrastructure. When the retail brokerage with the most users begins to add social features, it indicates that this space has been validated by independent platforms and proven its value.

The timing of this move also reveals a defensive posture. Blossom, AfterHour, and Fomo are capturing the minds of different types of retail investors. They do not need to be brokerages themselves but connect to existing brokerages through APIs. However, they control the layer of "discovery" and "discussion"—the place where investors decide what to buy. If trading occurs on Robinhood while discussions happen elsewhere, Robinhood could become merely a "pipeline."

The user stickiness brought by the social layer is irreplaceable by the execution layer. If all your friends are trading on AfterHour and the investors you follow on Blossom are not on Robinhood, then what is being migrated is not just assets but also the community, discussions, and context for decision-making. Robinhood has realized this and is beginning to respond, but it is following rather than leading this space.

Social Media is Becoming Market Infrastructure

StockTwits CEO Howard Lindzon speaks at the Bloomberg Link Empowered Entrepreneur Summit held in New York, USA, on April 14, 2011 (Thursday).
The summit brought together the most innovative entrepreneurs to spend a day with other businesspeople, investors, and potential business partners, engaging in in-depth discussions about entrepreneurship, financing, and business growth.

Social trading platforms are merging the previously separate functions of financial media and market infrastructure, creating an integrated user experience.

Imagine how Wall Street professionals work. They spend $24,000 a year subscribing to Bloomberg terminals. The value of the terminal lies not only in data or trading functions but in its integrated workflow: professionals can view markets, read news, analyze charts, chat with other traders, and execute trades all in one interface. Bloomberg's instant messaging system is still widely used because it is embedded in the trading process rather than forcing users to switch between different platforms.

Social trading platforms are building a similar experience for retail investors. StockTwits has 6 million users discussing the market in real-time. Founder Howard Lindzon (also the proposer of the "Degen Economic Index") launched this platform back in 2008, long before the retail trading frenzy. This community focuses on "what is happening now," rather than what CNBC reported three hours ago. During the GameStop surge in 2021, discussions took place on Twitter, StockTwits, and Reddit, rather than traditional financial media.

Blossom combines this concept with real holding data. When users link their accounts and discuss their actual holdings, the content generated not only serves other users but also becomes a data source for the platform. ETF issuers are willing to pay for exposure because retail investors discover funds through social information streams rather than through Morningstar ratings or financial advisor recommendations.

AfterHour's mechanism is that when the people you follow make trades, the platform pushes trading signals in real-time. This immediacy brings a sense of urgency that traditional media cannot match. When a respected investor buys a stock, you can see it immediately rather than waiting until after the market closes to see the day's highlights on CNBC.

Fomo allows users to see what assets others hold while trading millions of crypto tokens. The social information stream shows which tokens are gaining attention, even before mainstream crypto media reports on them. The discovery process is community-driven rather than determined by centralized editors deciding what is worth reporting.

This integration explains why traditional financial media struggles to attract younger investors. CNBC still uses a broadcast model: hosts explain, and viewers passively watch. The disconnect between media consumption and trade execution creates "friction." Young investors do not watch cable TV or wait for market summaries. They access content in real-time on their phones and make decisions.

Social trading platforms solve this problem by making content creation "participatory." Users create content through trading and discussion, and the platform is both a media company and a community generating signals from users. This structure reflects the media consumption habits of younger demographics—they do not distinguish between "creation" and "consumption," and social trading platforms are a reflection of this behavior in financial markets.

The business models of these platforms also embody the fusion of media and infrastructure. Blossom's revenue comes from ETF issuers purchasing exposure, similar to how media companies sell advertising. However, these ads are combined with real holding data, allowing issuers to determine whether their products genuinely attract users and pay based on actual results. AfterHour and Fomo profit from trading fees, similar to brokerage execution revenue, but trades occur in a social context driven by community discovery.

These platforms do not aim to replace CNBC or Bloomberg but rather to replace the experience of "disconnected media consumption and trade execution." The real innovation lies in integration: when discovery, discussion, and execution are completed within a single workflow without needing to switch platforms, the platform itself is no longer just an app but a new layer of financial infrastructure.

Trading Data is Becoming the Product Itself

Blossom Social once held an offline event for 1,400 people at the Rogers Centre in Toronto—this is also where the Blue Jays lost in Game 7 of the World Series.

Social trading platforms are generating an unprecedented dataset, and this data itself is the product, independent of the social functions that produce it.

Blossom has currently connected about $4 billion in assets, and this data reveals real retail behavior rather than their claimed preferences. Traditional market research relies on surveys asking investors what assets they hold or plan to buy, but such surveys are often affected by selection bias, recall bias, and idealized responses. Blossom, however, connects through brokerage accounts to directly verify users' real holdings.

Blossom publishes quarterly reports on retail fund flows into ETFs, revealing which categories are attracting funds and which are experiencing outflows. This data is important because retail trading now occupies a significant market share. In 2021, the activity of retail trading forced institutional investors to adjust their strategies, and this activity has not diminished with the retreat of GameStop.

ETF issuers are willing to pay for this data because it reveals whether their products truly resonate with retail investors. State Street and Vanguard compete for retail funds in the S&P 500 ETF, while VanEck and Global X vie for traffic in thematic ETFs. They need to know if retail investors are genuinely buying their funds, not just hearing about them.

Blossom can provide the answers. When 37% of connected assets are concentrated in the S&P 500 ETF, it indicates that this category has broad appeal; when covered call ETFs see strong inflows, it shows there is real demand for income-generating products; when crypto ETFs are widely adopted, it indicates that retail interest extends beyond speculative trading on exchanges. This data comes from real holdings, not surveys or focus groups.

AfterHour's holding verification mechanism reveals the actual stocks that the WallStreetBets community is trading, rather than just the popular stocks being discussed. Many stocks may be trending on social media but have low actual trading volumes. AfterHour can distinguish between "noise" and "signal" through users' linked real holdings. The $500 million in assets connected to the platform represents real funds making trading decisions based on community discussions.

Fomo's trading data reveals which crypto tokens are genuinely being adopted among retail investors, rather than just being hyped. The platform promises to support trading of millions of tokens across all blockchains, most of which will ultimately fail. However, understanding which tokens can sustain trading volumes and which are merely fleeting fads is crucial for understanding retail behavior.

As retail trading continues to rise in market share, the value of this data is also increasing. Social trading platforms are collecting information that traditional data providers find difficult to obtain. Retail investors do not submit 13F filings or publicly report their holdings. Brokerage data is typically siloed, while social trading platforms aggregate data across brokerages through user connections, breaking down traditional data silos.

This establishes the business model of these platforms: they do not profit from trading frequency but from information flow. Blossom does not require users to trade frequently; it only needs them to share their real holdings, making the data valuable. This model differs from the traditional commission-based or payment-for-order-flow brokerage logic, and the incentive mechanisms change accordingly.

Data products also create a competitive moat. Once ETF issuers begin to rely on Blossom's quarterly reports to formulate strategies, they become dependent on the data; once AfterHour shows hedge funds the real trading behaviors of retail investors, this information becomes part of their investment processes. These platforms are not only infrastructure for retail investors but are also becoming tools for institutions to understand retail behavior.

Trading has become a consumer behavior

The social trading infrastructure is becoming a permanent framework for the market. Although the user groups targeted by each platform differ, they share the same underlying logic: real holdings, real-time discussions, and business models built on transparency rather than trading volume.

The technology supporting this infrastructure is irreversible. Brokerage account connection APIs already exist and will continue to be optimized. The ability to verify holdings in real-time can be accessed by any platform. The question is not whether social trading infrastructure exists, but which platforms can capture which user groups.

The wave of retail trading triggered by GameStop has not receded. Retail investors who opened accounts in 2021 have not closed them after the meme stocks cooled off. Data shows they are still actively participating in the market. These investors need infrastructure to support their investment processes—a platform that can seamlessly integrate discovery, discussion, and execution.

Traditional brokerages can add social features, as exemplified by Robinhood. However, platforms that start from social and then integrate trading functions may have structural advantages. Blossom, AfterHour, and Fomo do not need to be brokerages themselves; they connect to all brokerages through APIs, allowing users to trade on familiar platforms while participating in social communities.

The business models of these platforms also validate sustainability. Blossom's revenue grew from $300,000 to $4 million in two years, indicating that ETF issuers are willing to pay to reach retail investors; AfterHour's daily active user data shows that social trading can form user habits; Fomo's trading volume growth proves that crypto natives crave a socialized trading experience. These are not one-off products but infrastructure serving real needs.

The regulatory environment is also supporting rather than hindering this framework. Social trading platforms do not hold assets or execute trades; they provide communities and discussions around real holdings. This structure avoids most regulatory complexities faced by brokerages. The platforms collaborate with compliant brokerages rather than compete with them.

The future development path will be one of continued segmentation. More platforms will emerge to serve specific retail investor groups: some will focus on options trading, some will cater to dividend income investors, and others will target emerging markets. They will build communities around real data and integrate trading execution without needing to become brokerages.

Ultimately, the winners will be those platforms that truly understand their user groups, rather than those trying to serve everyone. Retail investors are not a monolithic group; successful social trading platforms reflect this reality in their product design, business models, and community culture. Benchmark's investment in Fomo also validates this logic: they are investing in a platform that focuses on serving crypto natives and supports them in trading millions of tokens within the community.

Social trading infrastructure does not necessarily need to replace brokerages; rather, it adds a layer on top of them—where community, discussion, and discovery are happening. This layer is becoming as important as the brokerages themselves. Platforms building this layer are creating a permanent market structure for retail investors.

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