Just two months ago, NFT trading platform Tensor raised $3 million in a launch round. Fast forward to today, and it is poised to regain its position as the largest Solana-based NFT marketplace by market share.
“There was a lot of momentum coming from the announcement,” said Tensor co-founder Richard Wu, speaking of the seed round, which MinRegion covered exclusively in March. “When it comes to a marketplace, liquidity is key to attracting users, and it snowballed on its own.”
Tensor reached 45% of Solana’s NFT market share last week, surpassing Solana-centric NFT marketplace Magic Eden’s 44% share over a seven-day period, according to data collected by Tiexo. While the 1% difference may seem nominal, it’s a huge leap for a fairly new platform against a behemoth with nearly 200x the users.
Tensor launched a private beta in June 2022 and opened to the public the following month. In March, it had more than 30,000 monthly active users, and by April its MAU was up about 317% to more than 125,000, co-founder Ilja Moisejevs said.
Compared to Magic Eden, which has 22 million unique monthly visitors, its market share is significant.
Magic Eden has since regained the top spot for Solana-based NFT volume in the past seven days with a share of 44.2%, according to Tiexo data, and Tensor is not far behind at 40.5%. But market share is “not the top priority” for Tensor, Wu said. “For us, market share is a measure of what we build, but ultimately our goal is to grow Solana 10x.”
“I think a lot of people on Twitter like to dramatize things,” Moiseyevs said. “They want to see a market battle. There is healthy competition between us [and Magic Eden], but the point we want to drive home is that we’re not here to win 80% of a non-existent market. We want us to win, Solana to win, and we will become a bigger company if Solana does well as a chain.”
Solana is the third-largest blockchain for NFTs by sales volume, with more than $3.96 billion in sales all-time, according to data from NFT aggregator CryptoSlam. Over the past 30 days, Solana NFT’s sales volume fell about 24.4% to $73.3 million, the data showed.
Overall, the Solana ecosystem is getting stronger, at least compared to six months ago, Wu said. A good example of that is the people and projects like Mad Lads, he said, adding that at one point it was a top collection in volume before some Ethereum blue chip collections. “What they’ve done and demonstrated with their launch at Solana is incredible.”