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Tensorpreviously a relatively small contender in Solana NFT marketplace wars, quickly taking market share after taking a side from Playbook of leading Ethereum platform Blur– by targeting “pro” traders and providing “loyalty” rewards for using the marketplace.
The platform launched its “Season 1 airdrop” on Monday, added Solana NFT collectors claim free reward boxes issued in proportion to their trading activity on the blockchain network. Anyone who bought or sold a Solana NFT on any marketplace in the past six months is eligible, and those who did so on Tensor will receive “25x-50x more rewards,” per a tweet.
It is extremely close in design, execution and aesthetics to the model developed by Blur, an upstart Ethereum NFT marketplace that debuted last October. In February, Blur became rocketed to the top of the charts in the form of Ethereum NFT trading volume as users flipped NFTs en masse to maximize BLUR airdrop rewards.
Tensor’s Solana NFT trading volume rose to a new one-day high on Monday, according to public blockchain data collected by analysis platform Duneand reached 23,351 SOL—about $486,000 worth based on the value of Solana at the end of the day, according to CoinGecko. The platform saw nearly 2,800 NFT trades during this time.
According to data for the entire market collected by TiexoTensor has facilitated approximately 19% of all Solana NFT trading volume in the past 24 hours, compared to 60% for the market leader Magical Eden. That’s a remarkable increase, given that Tensor has only accounted for about 6% of Solana NFT trading volume over the past 30 days.
Today, following the surge in trading activity and attention resulting from the airdrop, Tensor announced that it has done so raised a seed round of $3 million led by VC firm Placeholder, with participation from Solana co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal along with Solana Ventures, Big Brain Holdings and MonkeVentures. Notable pseudonymous trader HGE, who also founded rival trading platform Hadeswap, also joined.
IN a Twitter threadThe Tensor team said it began raising seed funding in November as cryptocurrency exchange FTX — which was closely related to the Solana ecosystem—began to collapse. The startup said it struggled to convince some potential investors, but it eventually found interested backers in the area.
“Each VC started the conversation by asking us when we’re leaving Solana,” Tensor wrote. “We told them we’re not and they proceeded to hang up right away.”
Like Blur, Tensor is built around automated market makers (AMM) trading pools instead of standard marketplace listings, which provides increased liquidity for buying and selling NFTs. It also offers a detailed “pro” interface with additional tools for traders.
In the same way that Blur promised traders to send “care packages” with mysterious rewards inside, Tensor provides trading reward “boxes” for them to claim. Blurry at the end launched its own token for these traders to claim. So far, Tensor has said the boxes contain “fun stuff you might like” and suggested the descriptions contain clues for traders.
“Tensor believes in a decentralized Web3 future with the most important protocols owned by the community,” it tweeted. “YOU are why Tensor is awesome, and if we ever build something important, we want YOU to own a piece of it.”
On Monday, Tensor announced the launch of a major second season airdrop that will only reward trading activity on its own platform, rather than the broader Solana NFT market. Traders will receive rewards based on bidding or listing NFTs, as well as providing liquidity to pools, with a “loyalty” metric and upcoming score chart feeding into the trading process.
