An on-chain experiment measuring market FOMO in real time.
A market emptied of every reason to buy except one, so that one can finally be read off a chart.
Fear of missing out is treated everywhere as an explanation and almost nowhere as a quantity. It is invoked after the fact, when a chart has already moved, by people who were not asked at the time and would not have answered honestly if they had been.
This study proposes that FOMO becomes measurable the moment every other reason to buy is removed. No product. No roadmap. No revenue, no yield, no claim on anything. What remains is a market whose only input is the awareness that other people are entering it — and whose price is therefore not a valuation but a reading.
The instrument is f(o). The subjects are whoever buys it. The results are published continuously, to the subjects, while collection is ongoing. That last part is not an oversight.
Nobody has ever admitted to it in advance.
Ask a hundred people why they bought and you will get a hundred theses. Ask them a week later, after it fell, and you will get one word.
This is the whole difficulty. FOMO is the only market force that is universally acknowledged in hindsight and universally denied in the moment. A survey cannot reach it because the answer changes depending on when you ask, and the honest version is only available once it no longer matters.
The usual workaround is to infer it — from volume spikes, from social mentions, from search volume climbing ahead of a move.1 But every one of those measures is contaminated. A volume spike can be an index rebalancing. A mention can be a bot. Search volume rises for curiosity as readily as for greed. You end up measuring attention and calling it appetite.
What is needed is an instrument where no other explanation is available. Where a buyer cannot tell themselves, or anyone else, that they were early to a technology, or that the fundamentals were compelling, or that the team was strong. Where the only sentence that survives contact with the facts is: I bought because it was going up.
A market with nothing inside it.
f(o) is deliberately, completely empty. There is no application behind it, no treasury doing anything, no partnership, no mechanism that converts holding into income. This is not modesty and it is not a placeholder for features arriving later. The emptiness is the instrument.
Every feature a token could have is a competing explanation for why somebody bought it. Strip them out one by one and the space of possible motives narrows until a single one is left standing. A buyer of f(o) cannot be buying discounted cash flows, because there are none. They cannot be early to a protocol, because there is no protocol. They are buying because a number moved and other people noticed.
Which means the price of f(o) is not an estimate of anything. It has no fair value to be above or below. It is the dependent variable.
The name is the claim in miniature. f(o) is a function of one argument — others. Nothing else is passed in.
The instrument, as it stands right now.
The index below is computed from the instrument's own market. It is a reading, not a forecast, and it is worth exactly as much as the market underneath it.
How the index is computed
The reading is a normalised blend of four public quantities, each of which is available to anyone with the mint address. Nothing is proprietary and nothing is weighted by hand after the fact.
| input | what it contributes |
|---|---|
| buy pressure | the share of trades in the window that are buys. A market where nine in ten prints are buys is not being valued, it is being chased. The heaviest single input. |
| acceleration | not the price change, but the change in the change. Steady climbs read low. Climbs that steepen read high. |
| entrant rate | new addresses per unit time, relative to existing holders. Distinguishes a crowd arriving from the same people trading with each other. |
| turnover | volume against liquidity. Measures how hard the crowd is pushing relative to how much room there is to push into. |
What the instrument has shown, to date.
Three of these were expected. The fourth was not, and is the reason the study is still running.
The denial is structural, not personal.
Participants do not describe their own entry as FOMO even while describing everyone else's that way, and they do it in the same sentence. This is too consistent across too many people to be dishonesty. It appears to be how the feeling presents from the inside: as timing.
Emptiness does not reduce participation.
Stating plainly and repeatedly that the instrument contains nothing has no observable dampening effect. If anything the disclosure is read as a kind of candour and treated as a reason for confidence — which is itself a finding, and an uncomfortable one.
The reading leads the price, briefly.
Buy pressure and entrant rate move before price does, on a short horizon. This is not predictive in any useful sense — the lead is short, noisy, and disappears exactly when it would be worth money. Do not trade on it.
The subjects read the results.
This page is public. Participants can see the index, and some of them act on it — which alters the next reading, which they then also see. The study is measuring a quantity that is watching itself being measured. See §V.
The study is inside its own sample.
A conventional experiment would hide the readings until collection ended. That option was never available here. The instrument is a public market; its data is public by construction; and a study of FOMO that concealed its own chart would be a study of something else.
So the feedback loop is admitted rather than avoided. The index is published live. Participants see it. Some buy because the reading is high, which raises the reading. Some sell for the same reason, which lowers it. Both responses are data.
This makes f(o) a poor instrument by the standards of a laboratory and an unusually faithful one by the standards of a market — because every market is a measurement its subjects can read. The difference here is only that the paper says so out loud.
Everything wrong with this, listed by us.
A study that only publishes its strengths is marketing. These are the objections we consider strongest, including the ones that damage the premise.
The sample is not the population.
Everyone measured here chose to be in a market. Whatever this reads, it reads about people already willing to buy an empty token — not about markets in general, and not about you.
The index cannot separate FOMO from imitation.
Buying because others are buying may be fear of missing out, or it may be a reasonable heuristic in a domain where you have no other information. The instrument cannot tell those apart, and calling all of it FOMO is a simplification we have chosen, not a fact we have shown.
A high reading is not a signal.
Finding F—03 is weak, short-lived and unreliable. Nothing on this page is a trading indicator. Treating the index as one would be the exact behaviour the index exists to describe.
The instrument can go to zero.
It contains nothing. That is the design, and it means there is no floor underneath it, no treasury to fall back on and no reason it must retain any value at all. Most participants in experiments like this lose money. Only participate with what you are prepared to lose entirely.
There is no enrolment and no consent form.
Buying f(o) makes you a data point. Not buying it also makes you one, in the sense that the study is equally interested in how many people read this page in full and then closed it.
There is nothing to claim, nothing to stake, no allocation held back and no mechanism by which holding pays. If you are looking for the part of the page where the returns are described, that part does not exist, and its absence is the method.
The honest summary: this is a memecoin with an essay attached. The essay is sincere. The memecoin is still a memecoin.