Crypto trading’s core technology is sound; the real barrier is trust when it comes to user experience. The charts work, the order books work, the wallets work. What it’s never solved is approachability. Most platforms are built by people who already speak the language, for people who already speak the language, and everyone else just gets handed a cockpit and told to figure it out. Closing that gap was Adam Hilborn’s job. As Creative Director at WE3, he was brought in to build the brand for fomo.family, and what’s come out of it is one of the more closely watched brand stories in consumer fintech right now.
Hilborn started shaping FOMO’s identity in 2025. Since then, the platform has gone from an early-stage crypto startup to a social trading app with cross-chain support, live leaderboards, copy trading, and Apple Pay onboarding baked in. Two very different people are using that product at once: a crypto native trader chasing an edge, and someone buying their first token ever. The brand had to hold up for both.
Designing For Two Audiences
The goal was not merely to construct a new visual identity, but to fundamentally humanize the trading experience. Hilborn sat down directly with FOMO’s founders, its product team, and its engineers, and together they built out the system underneath everything the company does: one designed to educate crypto-native traders and newcomers alike.
Product, marketing, the site, motion, UX, all of it had to feel like one thing. Understanding the customer meant bridging the gap between crypto-native traders, traditional finance, and people who’d never made a trade in their life. A seasoned on-chain trader needed to recognize the platform as credible. Someone just curious enough to try a prediction market-style bet for the first time needed to not feel lost. Getting both of those right at once, while designing with the future of finance in mind, was the actual brief.
The aesthetic pairs hyper-surrealism with thoughtful restraint, all anchored by a structured Swiss typographic system. Type stays clean. The palette stays tight. Icons were built so that a complicated trading action reads clearly instead of piling on. Engineering got a developer-ready Figma system and a full set of brand guidelines to work from, which meant the identity didn’t stop at the homepage. It carried through mobile-first web design and a set of motion principles all the way into the product itself, into the small moments most users never consciously notice.
Hilborn’s design instincts were forged long before FOMO. Before WE3, he was at IDEO, including a stretch as Senior Design Lead in the New York studio, working on projects that ranged from healthcare to commercial spaceflight onboarding. He was also part of IDEO CoLab Ventures, uncovering emerging insight and innovation in crypto and AI, with a particular focus on blockchain technology. That’s the kind of work that teaches you to make complexity legible no matter the industry, and provides a definitive advantage when navigating an industry where blockchain technology is constantly in question. This was followed by his tenure at Rivian, where he focused on centralizing and scaling the brand during the EV manufacturer’s rapid expansion phase—a challenge that prepared him for the exact scaling objectives FOMO presented next.
The Funding Backs It Up
The traction followed the design work. FOMO went from a $2 million pre-seed round backed by more than 140 angel investors, to a $17 million Series A led by Benchmark (a round TechCrunch flagged as a rare crypto bet from a firm that’s historically stayed away from the space), to a $75 million Series B led by Index Ventures, with Union Square Ventures joining in, covered by AlleyWatch and others. That round put FOMO’s valuation at roughly $550 million and pulled in angel money from names like Zynga co-founder Mark Pincus and Discord CEO Humam Sakhnini.
The user numbers back it up too. Hundreds of thousands are now on the platform. Tens of thousands bought crypto for the first time through Apple Pay. One recent app review chalked a good chunk of that adoption curve up to how unintimidating the product feels next to a traditional exchange.
Why It Matters
Trust in a trading product gets built visually long before it gets built by track record. Hilborn treated that as a design problem from day one, with typography, hierarchy, and restraint doing just as much work as the trading infrastructure underneath them.
The system itself was built for modularity: able to flex and change with the market, powered by sophisticated AI workflows Adam developed in-house at WE3. But underneath the flexibility, the priority never moved: every design decision had to serve the customer’s experience, creating room to learn and to follow others through the social fabric of the platform.
As FOMO pushes further into cross-chain markets and starts positioning itself as a broader gateway into on-chain finance, it’s the same brand system carrying it there. One built to make crypto trading feel less like a cockpit, and more like something anyone could just try, and, increasingly, something you figure out alongside other people, and not alone.
Explore fomo.family and see more of Adam Hilborn’s work at linkedin.com/in/adamhilborn.
About the Author
Marcus Feldt is a design and technology writer covering the intersection of brand strategy and emerging industries, with a focus on the creative leads behind fast-growing consumer platforms.
