Pod Notes #1: Tensor

Welcome to Pod Notes - a new weekly series where we give you a rundown of the most important takeaways from the previous week’s podcast. Perfect for when you may not have time to tune in for the full hour, or want to see if the full episode is worth a watch.

This Week: The Science of NFT Trading w/ ilmoi from Tensor

• Drawn to crypto due to its meritocratic nature - it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from. You can have a place here if you provide value and you can change your life by doing so

• Exit Liquidity Story - Bought $COPE near the top and rode it down to zero

• Tensor’s North Star - They started out wanting to serve “pro-NFT traders” only to learn that the user group doesn’t really exist, just “traders.” Existing marketplaces didn’t really serve traders well enough, Tensor had an early read on what features traders did care about so they honed in on that

  • eBay was the norm in marketplaces, Tensor was to be Bloomberg

• Ilmoi’s favorite feature: Price lock due to its uniqueness

• Feature he’s most looking forward to: The shared liquidity layer that Tensor will provide to other builders when they decentralize + open source + incentivize developers

• Price lock: provides cap efficiency + ability to hedge

  • Similar to options, but wanted something much simpler to better cater to their audience. Felt the market isn’t liquid enough to support perps right now

• Tensor started out as an aggregator, not a marketplace. Built an AMM, kept shipping features, but had very little liquidity and users for a while. Eventually their efforts paid off and started to compound, which led to Ilmoi’s “I can’t believe this” moment when they went from 0 to 10% market share

• They built features similar to a lot of CEXes rather than trying to emulate OpenSea

• You can’t build a single UI for NFTs due to the diversity of their form factor being unlimited, but you can build and infrastructure layer for other devs who understand their niche to build on top of

• Developments in Token22/ERC-404s have been interesting, he doesn’t know if they'll capture them because you have to pick your battles

• Tensor team is now receiving salary points instead of actual salary, team morale is through the roof /s

• First two seasons culminated with the Tensorian mint - S3 is the biggest and more important season - going to be ending soon

• He thinks the NFT ecosystem is going to become a lot more interesting and diverse in the coming years with novel shit that is Only Possible On Solana