Tensor - Solana's NFT Marketplace | Ilja & Richard Wu

Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of the NFT ecosystem on Solana. That's right, it's a Solana episode today on the show. We're having the two co founders of Tensor, the leading NFT marketplace on Solana.

Bankless Station, I'm sure you're all familiar with NFT marketplaces, but what about being on Solana makes it different?

How do the different properties and foundation that Solana offers impact the product decisions that Richard and Ilya have made at Tensor?

What are the first things that someone would notice is different about Tensor versus the NFT marketplaces on Ethereum? How did the Jito Airdrop impact the Tensor ecosystem? And what about the Tensorians? The native NFT PFP of Tensor? Who rocks a Tensorian and why? And of course, towards the end, I asked Richard and Ilya about whether or not Tensor will be joining in on the Solana Airdrop fun. I enjoyed talking to some of the dev teams on Solana, asking about them about why Solana. What about Solana nerd snipe them? Many of these dev teams I talked to all dabbled with Ethereum and then eventually moved over to Solana and stuck with it. Why? Questions like these I'm always curious about as to why people end up in the ecosystems that they end up in in crypto. So let's go ahead and get right into the conversation with Ilya and Richard from Tensor. But first, a moment to talk about these fantastic sponsors. Make this nation, I'm excited to introduce you to Ilya, the co founder and CEO of Tensor.

Ilya, welcome to Bankless.

Hey guys, how's it going? Good to be here.

And joined with us as well Richard, the CTO of TenSur. Richard, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having us.

So this is going to be one of these shows that I think a lot of bankless listeners, we understand what an NFT marketplace is. Many of them will have already used an NFT marketplace. It'll be like OpenSea or Blur. But this is going to be a little bit different because this is on Solana. And so of course we're going to walk through what Tensor is. And I think we can also learn a thing or two about what it's like, what the NFT ecosystem, what NFT marketplaces are like inside of a different world, a different universe, that universe being Solana, of course. But first, before we get into that, maybe just uh a round of introductions about you two. Uh, who are you guys? Where'd you guys come from? Uh, what was your crypto journey? Kind of just like illuminate uh your background for us. Ilya, why don't you go first?

Sure, yeah.

So I guess

I got into crypto first in 2016, 2017, lost a bunch of money, didn't stick stick around.

One does. Unlike you guys. Yeah, S1DOS exactly.

For whatever it's worth, I lost a bunch of money, but I didn't sell. And I held it all the way through the next bull market.

Um

and then kind of in 2019, like when COVID hit, um I had to like move back home. And crypto was like the perfect industry to explore from your bedroom because it's like a world of opportunity, keyboard away.

And so I got like really into it, started hacking on Ethereum at first, built a couple smart contracts.

And then I discovered Solana. And I guess like

what I what basically made me fall in love in Solana was just the UX. It was like so smooth and so easy to use.

And also like the developer inside of me was like, ah, this is a cool opportunity to learn Rust. So I'm just gonna jump at it.

Um and so I started hacking in Solana for like a year or so.

Um, then decided to like actually build some more complicated products, like maybe try a startup.

Started looking for a co founder.

And that's when I met Richard online as well, COVID times.

I am very familiar with uh meeting co-founders online during during covert times. Uh Richard, uh why don't you also kind of illuminate your background for us?

Yeah. So I sort of came from

actually a TradFi background. So back in like right before COVID,

started a full-time job at a quantitative trading firm

as an AI quant researcher.

And so I was like very much doing like quant research in the TradFi setting where I would be predicting stock returns, creating models around it, backtesting them,

and hopefully deploying them and making making some money for the firm.

What was interesting at the time was that obviously COVID happened.

All the asset prices just started

like skyrocketing, like tech stocks, equity in general, uh, crypto, of course, just right after the initial like dip,

just like went to the moon.

And a lot of my colleagues, a lot of my trader friends actually started talking about crypto a lot.

Specifically about Solana.

I think what was appealing at the time was that

at least when I got into crypto like way back in 2017, and I was just like trading Ethereum on Coinbase,

um,

the common impression of crypto was that it was a very slow database.

That happens to be permissionless.

And it wasn't like very interesting to, at least to me,

because I felt that in Web 2, things were built for scale. Whereas it seems like on Ethereum,

it wasn't quite there yet.

And so when I heard about Solana in 2020 from my trader friends, they all mentioned how it was positioned as you know the NASDAQ,

the NASDAQ of the world, where it's permissionless, you can trade and sub 400 millisecond transactions. And that's what sort of got me excited about crypto is that, oh, look, there's sort of these new chains that are much faster, higher throughput, and can actually support like high frequency trading.

Um long story short, I was also like getting the itch to like work on a startup. And so that's when I

uh you know started looking for a co founder, went on YC startup school, found Alias profile. He had been building on Solana and was deep into Web3.

And uh yeah, I guess that would rest his history.

So there's some serendipity about both of you kind of getting the uh want to build something itch and also need a second half, uh a plus one for for my journey. Uh again, like I said, I can totally relate. Uh but when did the idea for Tensor come to be? Uh because it sounds like the idea to build Tensor came after the idea to build a startup. Uh so where did the Tensor idea incept from?

Yeah, I think it's pretty common for like founders to change ideas. So when we met,

we actually did this like funny exercise when we went through like a two hour call and a like a 40 bullet checklist, just asking each other questions like.

What is your risk appetite? You know, like how hard you want to work, how many like hours a day like are you gonna be putting into this? Like how serious are you?

It might sound funny, it's almost like a dating checklist,

but when you're picking a co-founder, you you're basically picking like somebody you're gonna be spending as much time with, if not more, as your actual partner. And so I think it's really important to do that.

And I think like

once we aligned on that, then there was like, okay, what are we gonna build?

And we had a couple ideas. We sort of like thrown back and forth, some DeFi ideas, some NFT ideas, but all in all, the feeling we were getting was that the NFT space was like.

10X underdeveloped compared to DeFi. It was just like newer, they were like, it was like quirkier, weirder.