Solana-centric NFT trading platform Tensor has raised $3 million in a seed round led by Placeholder, a team shared exclusively with TechCrunch.
The startup was co-founded by Ilja Moisejevs and Richard Wu and brought together a decade of experience working on trading infrastructure and data-intensive systems. To this point, Tensor has won two of his Solana hackathons in 2022, and from about $60,000 he was out-of-pocket $70,000 in prize money, Moisejevs shares.
“Basically, we are trying to define the next meta for Solana NFTs,” said Wu. “A lot of what is done in Solana is a carbon copy of Ethereum, and we believe Solana NFTs could be much more than that.”
Seed round investors include Solana Ventures, Alliance DAO, Big Brain Holdings, and Solana co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal.
Moisejevs said Tensor began raising funding around the time FTX collapsed. He added that half of the funding has come from smaller angel investors or clients who have been using the platform “from day one.”
“We went through the rounds, and in the end, we didn’t really need the money because we were making pretty good commissions at the time,” Wu said. “We had a yearly run rate of over $1 million for him. Now we’re a three-man team for him, so we’re covering more than the cost.”
According to data from NFT aggregator CryptoSlam, Solana is the third largest NFT blockchain in terms of revenue with over $3.7 billion. Over the past 30 days, the data shows that Solana NFT’s sales fell by about 47.7% to $76.5 million.
The trading-focused platform offers advanced features such as TradingView integration, bidding across collections, and market orders, Wu shared. Private He launched in beta mode in June 2022 and went public the following month. Since then, Tensor has grown to over his 30,000 monthly active users and NFT trading volume has exceeded his $6.6 million, Moisejevs said.
Image credit: tensor (opens in new window)
“The interesting thing about Solana NFTs and NFTs in general is that despite the macro situation, there is still excitement in the space, which shows that NFTs are not a passing fad and that there is something here. There is,” said Wu. “For our part, we want to provide the trading infrastructure and technology infrastructure for NFTs going forward. .”
In recent months, Ethereum-focused NFT marketplace Blur has sparked some controversy within the ecosystem as it implemented a 0.5% creator royalty fee. This small fee has triggered other major NFT marketplaces such as OpenSea to amend their fee structure to include “limited-time” zero-cost transactions and minimal creator royalties. Otherwise, you risk losing more market share.
While Blur is part of the Ethereum NFT ecosystem, Moisejevs said Tensor hopes to be a “similar but different” version of Blur in the world of Solana. The Solana-focused platform will allow the collection to take advantage of the option for him to opt-in for a fixed creator royalty of 1% on all transactions, he added. That he has a 1% majority, i.e. 0.9% goes to the Creator and 0.1% goes to the Tensor.
To date, a handful of collections have opted in to flat creator royalties, but the co-founders expect about 80% of collections to agree to the standard within three months. The platform also incentive plan On Monday, Wu said, it will provide community members with “boxes” containing rewards and NFTs.
“At web3, our customers are our partners. I’ve seen marketplaces that weren’t able to do that because they catered to web3 with the web2 mentality of trying to extract value from their customers…we want to be the exact opposite: community owned It’s about building products that work.”
