Tensor Raises $3M for Solana-Focused NFT Trading Platform

Image credit: Yuichiro Chino/Getty Images

Tensor, a Solana-centric NFT trading platform, has raised $3 million in a seed round led by Placeholder, the team exclusively shared with TechCrunch.

The start-up was co-founded by Ilja Moisejevs and Richard Wu, and has a total of 10 years of experience working with trading infrastructure and data-intensive systems. Until this point, Tensor was cut off about $60,000-$70,000 in prize money from winning two Solana hackathons in 2022, Moisejevs shared.

“We’re really trying to define the next meta for Solana NFTs,” Wu said. “A lot of things that have been done on Solana are carbon copies of Ethereum, and we think Solana NFTs can be so much more.”

Investors in the seed round include Solana Ventures, Alliance DAO, Big Brain Holdings and Solana 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 customers who have used the platform “since day one,” he added.

“As we went through the round, towards the end we didn’t really need the money because at that point we were making quite a lot in fees,” Wu said. “We just passed $1 million in annual run rate and we’re a three-person team now, so that more than covers 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 from NFT aggregator CryptoSlam. Over the past 30 days, Solana NFT sales volume has fallen by about 47.7%, to $76.5 million, the data showed.

The trading-focused platform offers advanced features such as TradingView integration, pool-wide bids and make-to-market orders, Wu shared. It launched in private beta mode in June 2022 and opened to the public the following month. Since then, Tensor has grown to over 30,000 monthly active users and has traded over $6.6 million in NFT volume, Moisejevs said.

Image credit: Tensor (opens in new window)

“What’s interesting about Solana NFTs, and NFTs in general, is that despite macro conditions, there’s still excitement in the space, and that’s an indication that NFTs aren’t a fad, there’s something here, Wu said. “For us, we want to provide the trading infrastructure and technology infrastructure for NFTs going forward. We think this is going to 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 sparked some controversy in the ecosystem when it implemented a 0.5% royalty fee, which is so nominal to many that some see it as essentially zero. This small fee was a trigger that prompted other major NFT marketplaces like OpenSea to change their fee structure to include zero-cost trading for a “limited time” and minimal royalties for creators – or risk losing even more market share.

While Blur is part of the Ethereum NFT ecosystem, Tensor hopes to be a “similar but different” version of Blur in the Solana world, Moisejevs said. The Solana-focused platform gives collections the ability to sign up for a 1% flat creator royalty on every trade, he added. Of that 1%, a majority, or 0.9%, would go to the creator and 0.1% to Tensor.

To date, a handful of collections have signed up to the flat creator royalty, but the co-founders expect about 80% of collections to accept the standard within three months. The platform also launched a incentive plan on Monday that will provide rewards and “boxes” with NFTs in them to community members, among other things, Wu said.

“In web3, customers are your partners. You have to align them financially, motivationally and in many different ways,” Moisejevs added. “We’ve seen with other ecosystem participants and large marketplaces that they haven’t been able to do that because they’ve shown up to web3 with a web2 mindset that they is going to abstract value out of the customers … We want to be the opposite of that and build a product that is owned by the community.”