Tensor is a platform for trading Solana-based NFTs. Its creators recently said that the company has raised $3 million in a seed round led by Placeholder.
Tensor’s founders
The company was started by Ilja Moisejevs and Richard Wu, who have worked together for 10 years on trading infrastructure and systems with a lot of data. Moisejevs says that up until this point, Tensor had been self-funded by prize money won from two Solana hackathons in 2022.
Wu said that the team was figuring out what the next meta for Solana NFTs would be. We think that Solana NFTs can be so much more than the many things that have been done on Solana that are exact copies of Ethereum.
Some of the investors in the seed round are Solana Ventures, Alliance DAO, Big Brain Holdings, and the co-founders of Solana, Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal.
Solana, the third-largest blockchain for NFTs
Moisejevs said Tensor started to raise money around the time that FTX went out of business. He said that “from day one,” half of the money came from clients or small angel investors.
Wu added that as the round went on, we didn’t really need the money ’cause, at that point, we were making quite a bit in fees. We just crossed $1 million in annual run rate and we’re a three-person team now, so that covers more than our expenses and then some.”
CryptoSlam, a company that collects information about NFTs, says that Solana is the third-largest blockchain for NFTs in terms of sales volume, with more than $3.7 billion in sales in total. The number of Solana NFT sales dropped by about 47.7% in the last 30 days, to $76.5 million, according to the data.
Wu said that the trading-focused platform has cutting-edge features like TradingView integration, collection-wide bids, and market-creating orders. It started in June 2022 as a private beta test and went public in July 2022. Moisejevs says that since then, Tensor has grown to have more than 30,000 active users every month and has done more than $6.6 million in NFT volume.
Wu said that what is interesting about Solana NFTs and NFTs, in general, is that there is still excitement in the area even though macro conditions are bad. This shows that NFTs aren’t just a fad and that there is something here. “As for us, we plan to provide the technology backbone and trading infrastructure for NFTs in the future. We think this is the next asset class that will be worth a trillion dollars, and we want to be the main place where people can trade it.
Blur’s policies
Blur, an NFT marketplace that focuses on Ethereum, recently caused a stir in the industry by adding a 0.5% creator royalty fee, which some people think is so small that it is $0. This small fee pushed other major NFT marketplaces, like OpenSea, to change their pricing models to offer free trading for a “limited time” and low or no royalties for creators or risk losing even more market share.
This small fee pushed other major NFT marketplaces, like OpenSea, to change their pricing models to offer free trading for a “limited time” and low or no royalties for creators or risk losing even more market share.
Blur is a part of the Ethereum NFT ecosystem, but Moisejevs said that Tensor is meant to be a “similar but different” version of Blur in the Solana universe. He went on to say that the Solana-focused platform could also test a 1% fixed creator royalty on each trade. The inventor would get most of the 1%, or 0.9%, while the Tensor would get the rest or 0.1%.
Since then, it has become a “fully enforced royalties standard,” and a few collections have moved in. But the co-founders think that 80% of collections will follow the standard in three months. Wu thinks that the network also started an incentive program on Monday. The program will give community members things like prizes and “boxes” with NFTs in them.
In Web 3, your customers are your partners. Moisejevs went on to say that you must align them financially, psychologically, and in many other ways. We’ve seen that other ecosystem players and large markets haven’t been able to do this because they came to web3 with a web2 mindset and expected to get value from users. We want to make a product that belongs to the whole community, which is the exact opposite of what they did.
Content Source: techcrunch.com
Cover Image Source: solana.com
