Tensora Solana-focused NFT trading platform, has raised $3 million in a seed round led by Placeholder, the team shared exclusively with TechCrunch.
The startup was co-founded by Ilja Moisejevs and Richard Wu, bringing a collective 10 years of experience working on business infrastructure and data-intensive systems. Up to this point, Tensor has received between $60,000 and $70,000 in prize money for winning two Solana hackathons in 2022, Moisejevs shared.
“Basically, we are trying to define the next meta for Solana NFTs,” Wu said. “Many of the things that have been done on Solana are carbon copies of Ethereum and we believe that Solana NFTs can be so much more.”
Investors in the seed round include Solana Ventures, Alliance DAO, Big Brain Holdings, and Solana co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal, among others.
Tensor started raising capital around the time FTX collapsed, Moisejevs said. Half of the money came from small angel investors or clients who have been using the platform “since day one,” he added.
“Going through the round, toward the end we didn’t really need the money because at that point we were making quite a bit in commissions,” Wu said. “We just crossed $1 million in annual run fee and now we’re a three-person team, so that covers more than our expenses and then some.”
Solana is the third largest blockchain for NFTs by sales volume with over $3.7 billion in all-time sales, according to data on the NFT CryptoSlam aggregator. Over the past 30 days, Solana NFT sales volume fell 47.7% to $76.5 million, the data showed.
The trading-focused platform offers advanced functionalities such as TradingView integration, full-collection bids, and market-making orders, Wu shared. It was released in private beta mode in June 2022 and opened to the public the next month. Since then, Tensor has grown to more than 30,000 monthly active users and has traded more than $6.6 million in NFT volume, Moisejevs said.
Image Credits: Tensor (Opens in a new window)
“What’s interesting about Solana’s NFTs and NFTs in general is that despite the macro conditions, there’s still excitement in the space and that’s indicative that NFTs are not a fad, there’s something here,” he said. Wow. “For us, we want to provide the business infrastructure and the technology infrastructure for NFTs in the future. We believe this will be the next trillion dollar asset class and we want to be the financial trading rails for it.”
In recent months, Ethereum-focused NFT marketplace Blur has generated some controversy in the ecosystem, as it implemented a 0.5% creator royalty fee, which is so nominal to many that some view it as essentially zero. . This small fee was a trigger that caused other major NFT marketplaces like OpenSea to modify their fee structure to include zero-cost trading for a “limited time” and minimal creator royalties at best, or risk losing even more market share.
While Blur is part of the Ethereum NFT ecosystem, Tensor hopes to become a “similar but different” version of Blur in the Solana world, Moisejevs said. The Solana-focused platform also experimented with the option to opt for a flat 1% creator royalty on each transaction, he added. Of that 1%, the majority, that is, 0.9% would go to the creator and 0.1% would go to Tensor.
It has since moved to a “fully enforced royalty standard” and some collections have migrated, but the co-founders expect around 80% of collections to accept the standard within three months. The platform also launched a incentive plan on Monday that it will provide NFT-powered rewards and “boxes” to community members, among other things, Wu said.
“At web3, your customers are your partners. You have to align them financially, motivationally and in many different ways,” added Moisejevs. “We’ve seen with other ecosystem participants and large markets that they haven’t because they’ve come to web3 with a web2 mindset that they’re going to extract value from customers… We want to be the polar opposite of that and build a product that be owned by the community.
