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

Episode Date: January 24, 2024

In today’s episode, David is joined by Co-Founder and CEO of Tensor, Ilja Moisejevs and CTO of Tensor, Richard Wu.  The three cover: How the different properties and foundation of Solana impact the product decisions that Richard and Ilja have made at Tensor? What are the first things that someone would notice that's different about Tensor, versus the NFT marketplaces on Ethereum? How did the $JITO airdrop impact the Tensor ecosystem? What about the Tensorians, the native PFP NFT of Tensor…who rocks a tensorian, and why?  And of course, we had to ask Richard and Ilja whether or not Tensor will be joining in on the Solana airdrop fun…you won’t believe the answer. ----- 🏹 USE PODCAST24 FOR 10% OFF https://bankless.cc/Citizen2024  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE ⁠https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2    ⁠ 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle  ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum    🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo   🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/Toku  ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 3:55 Tensor Co-Founder Intros 7:15 Idea For Tensor 9:30 Learning Solana 12:32 How Solana Guided Tensor 16:49 Tensor NFT Marketplace  21:06 North Star of Tensor 29:00 Network Effects 33:40 Next Tensor Features 35:05 $JITO Airdrop 38:15 Tensorians   46:20 Solana 2024  49:38 Tensor Airdrop? 50:12 Resources, Closing & Disclaimers  ------ RESOURCES Ilja Moisejevs  https://twitter.com/_ilmoi  Richard Wu  https://twitter.com/0xrwu  Tensor https://twitter.com/tensor_hq  ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures ⁠ 

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 Tenor, the leading NFT marketplace on Solana. Bankruptation, I'm sure you're all familiar with the NFT on marketplaces, but what about being on Solana makes it different? How do the different properties and foundation that Solana offers impacts the product decisions that Richard and Ilya have made at Tenor? What are the first things that someone would notice is different about TensorFlow versus the NFT marketplaces on Ethereum?

How did the Gito AirDrop impact the TensorFlow 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 Salana AirDrop fun. I enjoy talking to some of the dev teams on Solana asking about them about why Salana. What about Solana nerdsknife 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 crypto. So let's go ahead and get right into the conversation with Ilya and Richard from TensorFlow. But first, a moment to talk about these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, especially Cracken. Whether you end up on Ethereum or Solana or any other ecosystem, get there with Cracken because Cracken can drop you off wherever you need to go. If you do not have an account with Cracken, consider Crakken. Consider, clicking the links in the show notes below to getting started with Cracken today.

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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 OpenC 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 TensorFlow is.

And I think we can also learn a thing or two about what it's like with 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 a round of introductions about YouTube. Who are you guys? Where did you guys come from? What was your crypto journey?

Kind of just like illuminate your background for us. Ilya, won'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 around. As one does. Unlike you guys.

Yeah, that's one does, 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. Cool. And then kind of in 2019, like when COVID hit, 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. 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, which is the U.S. 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 going to jump at it.

And so I started hacking in Solano for like a year or so. 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 meeting co-founders online during covert times. Richard, why don't you also kind of illuminate your background for us? Yeah. So I sort of came from actually a Tradify background.

So back in like right before COVID, started a full-time job at a quantitative trading firm as a AI quant researcher. And so I was like very much doing like quant research in the Tradify 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 skyrocketing like tech stocks, equity in general. 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. 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 Web2, 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 in 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. Long story short, I was also, like, getting the edge to, like, work on a startup.

And so that's when I, you know, started looking for a co-founder, went on YC startup school, found Aaliyos profile. He had been building on Solana and was deep into Web3. And, 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, a plus one for my journey. Again, like I said, I can totally relate. But when did the idea for TensorFlow come to be? Because it sounds like the idea to build TensorFlow came after the idea to build a startup. So where did the TensorFlow 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 like a 40 bullet checklist, just asking each other questions like, what is your risk appetite, you know, like how hard do you want to work, how many, like, hours a day, like, are you going to 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're basically picking, like, somebody you're going to 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 they were like, okay, what are we going to build? and we had a couple ideas we sort of like thrown back and forth some defy ideas

some NFT ideas but all in all the feeling we were getting was that the NFT space was like 10x underdeveloped compared to defy it was just like newer

there was like quirkier, weirder more people thought it was a joke which is a good sign because that means that there's probably a market there

that's overlooked and like honestly the existing products kind of sucked which just like point blank and so we thought okay well maybe we can build

something Our first idea was an Oracle for NFT pricing. We thought that it would power like a lot of lending and derivatives products for NFTs. And the truth is it probably will, just not right now. I think the market is a bit too early. It's like maybe five years from now, something like that would have a market. But yeah, long story short, we built it. We won like a price at a Salana Hackathon.

We tried selling that thing for like a couple of months. And we had exactly one customer because that was also the time when crypto was starting to go downhill. and there was just like no customers, nobody would pay for it. And that's kind of when we pivoted into our current idea, which was this more advanced marketplace. We just felt that there was like room for a product like that, and it was more immediate, right? Like you didn't need to wait for B2B customers

to come and buy your Oracle. What would you say are some of the things that you learned? Because Ilya, you said that you were taking around the Ethereum ecosystem for Solana, so you had some sharpened some of your teeth there in the EVM world. And then it sounds like you pivoted into the Solana ecosystem relatively early. Explain to us that experience. What was it like learning Solana, being a Solana developer, what were the new perspectives or just the things that you learned along the way?

Shred and sunlight on that for us. I think that Salana, when I came in, was a lot more raw. There was basically no docs. And if you wanted to understand something, you had to go source diving. But the one thing Salana had going for it was that it had a way more functional programming model, which a lot of developers like, and I liked a lot. And I just felt it a lot easier to reason about. And so even though there were fewer docs and I had to go and do stuff,

there was a lot lower level, in some way programming on Salana was better and more fun because you could think about it in a totally different way. And like, look, I'll be the first to say it. Like, there's no good or bad way. There's just preferences. Some developers prefer the object-oriented model, which is kind of more similar to how Ethereum and Solidity works. Others don't.

I think, like, with my weird brain, it just was a better fit. Yeah, I don't know, Richard. What do you think about Solana at programming at Solana? I would say sort of a good analogy is, so I didn't do too much of theorem development. I did, like, a couple of tutorials here and there. When I really got into Web3 and started building in Web 3, my first interaction of building smart contracts was really just Salona.

I think looking at how solidity contracts were written and comparing that to how Salana contracts were written, it's almost like comparing Python to writing in C++. Where in Python, you can quickly, you don't have to think about memory management, you don't have to think about specifying read and write accounts. You just almost like think about it as like in the business sense and you just write out, you know, the core interface. You specify the inputs, you specify the outputs, a couple lines of code to implement the logic. But everything is much more higher level. And it abstracts the way all the nitty gritty is that Solana actually requires from a dev to think about. On Solana, right, it's kind of like

C++ where you do have to think about read and writes. You do have to think about, in the case of Rust, how do you like figure out the Boro checker and making sure that the compiler is happy? And that's actually a pretty difficult experience, especially if maybe you haven't done any low-level programming before, where you haven't dealt with C++, memory management, you haven't written rest before. It's actually a pretty challenging experience for someone who's just getting into development. Maybe they come from a Python world, maybe they come from a JavaScript world, and they're trying to write their smart contract for the first time. So, of course, Solana has just these very unique properties that are unique to Solana that

Ethereum doesn't have, right? the speed, the cheap fees, the latency, like all of these things that all the Salana does just speak the world about Salana. How did that context about the context of building on Salon and the Salana ecosystem, how did that guide product decisions at Tenor? Because if you just copied like OpenC, that's not really being resonant with the foundation that you're building on. So just knowing that you were building inside of this different kind of platform, how do that guide decisions and just product decisions at TensorFlow. Yeah, I think it's actually embedded into product design from day one.

Like, when we envisioned TensorFlow, even though the assets themselves are non-fundable, we envisioned people basically trading them in bulk. The same way that even if you're trading something non-fundable and like, I don't know, some real estate need or something, you might actually buy two, three, four, or 50 of those. And so if you look at the product, it's basically built from first principles with like, I want to do everything in bulk. And Solana uniquely enables that because you just need so many transactions

and so many interactions to actually trade like 100 NFTs back and forth. To get really specific here, we actually built an AMM before we built a normal marketplace. And an AMM for those of you coming from Ethereum is like pretty similar to pseudo swap. There's a couple other ones out there.

It's basically like letting you set up pools that automatically rebalance and change prices based on what people do when they trade with them. and we only added like normal classical open C style listings over time and even today about 50% of our volume goes through the AMM and about 50% of the volume goes through normal contracts contracts that's very different to Ethereum right like look at the volume pseudo swap is doing compared to blur or open Cs like nothing right

and so I think that goes back to the properties of the chain where Solana Degence straight back and forth a lot more they really kind of want to do that, those like more advanced, like faster operations of the product. And so that's what denser's built for and that's what people use it for. Richard, what else would you add to that?

I would say a lot of the products that were, actually one big feature that we're about to release next week, I would say that is probably contingent on people willing to spend or transact more frequently compared to less frequently. and that's because of sort of like a time duration in that product where without spilling too much of the beans, this product, this feature,

will require you to roll over, you know, every seven days or 14 days. And you can imagine that could be pretty costly, especially if you're dealing with NFTs that are really cheap. And on Ethereum, like some of these NFTs, if you're like 10 bucks, you might be paying five bucks to, you know, initiate one of these contracts, we're calling it, or orders.

And that might be like, feasible. It might not make sense at all to be trading these NFTs like that. On the point about like NFTs being cheaper, I think what Solana uniquely enables that we have to cater to and we keep in mind when we're building the product are NFTs that are super cheap in absolute terms. So you might have an NFT collection where each NFT is less than a dollar, right? But what you can do is create these really large collections. And with compressed NFTs on Solana, which TLDR lets you create a million NFTs for less than $100,

you can actually scale these NFT collections to be beyond just, you know, your typical 10KP size. Instead, you can have a million NFTs. You could distribute this to maybe 100,000 wallets. So each person, maybe on average, holds 10 NFTs. But what you unlock here is you're able to trade much more finer quantities or more granular lump sums of these NFTs. And you don't have to think about, you know, gas fees because so long is just so cheap

for each of these transactions. So I think, like, going back to Ilya's point, bulk transactions become especially important when you're trading 10, 15 NFTs at once because the entire collection size is, you know, a million. And each of these NFTs are worth less than a dollar. Right. So, TensorFlow, of course, it's an NFT marketplace. And kind of like how I said earlier, if anyone is familiar with its ear,

and they're going to start to think about like OpenZ or Blur. When some user goes to TensorFlow, what's the first major difference that they'll notice? So like, oh, it's an NFT marketplace, but it also is like this or it does this thing. Like what would you say is the first new element that people would experience when they use TensorFlow? Probably, there's maybe two things that stick out to me.

So one of them is we have a very modular, composable UI. So you can like close different parts, of it, extend different parts of it, you can have like a floor price chart. If you come from like Tradfai and you're used to Bloomberg, that's like very similar. Like you can like move around stuff, like set it out whichever way you want.

That's really one thing. And another thing I think is we sort of in the top left. So actually this is funny, right? So our product actually looks a lot more like a perfect change where you have like the buy sell buttons on the left and then you can have like

all the other stuff on the right. And that's again intentional. It's just the world we come from. It's the kind of customers we have and it's the kind of experience we wanted to create for people. Like people love it or hate it. There's very few people in between. They either like really like it or they just like think it sucks.

That's fine. But like I guess the other thing I would... So it kind of sounds like Tenor has been built where like I kind of consider like OpenC to be like the collector's platform. It has higher fees. It has fewer total trades than Blur. And Blur is more like the financial NFT platform.

It sounds like on this spectrum, tensors closer towards like the financial side of NFTs rather than like the more of the collection side of NFTs. Yeah, I would even like to add that the reason why I think this works really well in Solana is because I think that the NFT audience is quite different from the NFT audience on Ethereum. I think on Ethereum you might find a larger proportion of collectors, people who like art, who like perhaps maybe what Kevin Rose is doing or, you know, some other big KOL who's launching an NFT collection, and they just want to buy and hold that NFT for a really long period of time.

I think on Solana, because fees are a lot cheaper and things move a lot faster, this almost encourages people to do more trading and to actually flip back and forth. There's also, like, there's this meme on Solana where people like say, like, Solana NFT DGens are just flippers, and they'll like undercut, undercut and like just sell at a loss like 10 minutes after a mint. And I think that's very true. We see that happen anecdotally very often. And I think that's just because of the culture that was unlocked by Salana being the cheap and fast chain back in the bull run,

when it was maybe a bit too expensive to trade like these high value NFTs on Ethereum. But you can just D-Gen and like flip and have fun on Solana. And actually I want to quickly jump in here and just say, so what Richard just said is actually really interesting. So typically you take any market in the world, like a mature market, you'll have two players in there that are a lot. large and successful. And what you'll typically find is that normally those players have the polar opposite ideologies. So you take Android, who's very open source and can not like, you know, everybody do what they want.

And then you have Apple who's a very like close source, verticalized, like, no, this is this way or the highway. And then equally like you might have like Apple and Microsoft. You might have like, you know, all of these markets. They typically have like a couple players that are like diametrically opposed. And that's because people have preferences, right? Some people want to trade back and forth. A lot of other people want to have the most secure way.

They want to get maximum security for their assets. They do not want to think about how many nodes there are. And they would rather pay the higher fee, but they want that security. And that's their preferences. And so they express that by choosing Ethereum. And so what I'm getting at, and I guess what got me excited when Salana, when I first looked at Salana, was that it's not better or worse. It's just different. And there's a lot fewer smart teams on Solana.

back at the time trying to build something versus Ethereum. And as a founder, that's the arbitrage you're looking for. You're looking for an area where you can build something awesome because nobody else is trying, but you kind of see why it might actually work out. So as you guys think about the direction of TensorFlow, how do you think about like the North Star? Like what is always the thing guiding product decisions? What metrics are you guys looking to grow?

How do you guys decide to prioritize things? Like, what is the North Star for, like, what the future direction of Tenor looks like? Is there any, like, sort of perspective you can give there? Yeah. So I think maybe this goes into the question of, like, what is the vision for TensorFlow in the next two, three, five, ten years? The high-level statement of what TensorFlow is going to become is we want to become the financial stack for NFTs on Solana. That means we want to capture as much of any sorts of financial transactions involving NFTs on Solana. And that might mean tracking market share in some respects.

That might mean tracking the number of users interacting with NFTs on Solana and how many of them are interacting with our smart contracts. I think our North Star is basically we want to become the base liquidity layer for NFTs on Solana. So we first started off with this NFT marketplace. You can think of that almost like a spot exchange for tokens, right? Or in TradFi, you have like these spot exchanges like Nizzi or NASDAQ. and a lot of liquidity flows in and out of there. People perform arbitrages between the spot market

and perhaps derivative markets. They hedge using the spot market, so on and so forth. That's almost like the base layer and fundamental to us building this financial stack. Now that we have, you know, the vast majority of liquidity on Solana for that market, for that spot exchange for NFTs, now you can start building more interesting things on top that enable different ways of trading,

different ways of financialization. So the next product will release, and here's a bit of alpha, is that instead of perhaps being able to only buy an NFT and having that capital locked in, you can become much more efficient, right? You could perhaps only spend a fraction of that amount and be able to get, you know, exposure to an NFT collection that you're very bullish on. And likewise, you might be able to do it on the other end, where if you think that, okay, I have like too much risk in holding, you know, a hundred tensorians,

And, you know, I want to like hedge myself a bit. I can also do that with this new feature. So that's really what we're trying to like push towards is we want to build the fundamental protocols at the very bottom of financialization for NFTs and then have other people build on top of us. Right? Instead of like trying to own the entire pie being a closed ecosystem, we think one thing that's special about Web3 is the idea of like composability and actually having other people build

stuff on top of us that we wouldn't have the bandwidth or the time. or even the expertise to build. So if someone wanted to build a vertical marketplace for RWAs, but they don't want to like chew glass and figure out how to write a robust battle-tested marketplace to enable the transactions of these RWAs, then you just build on top of Tensor. We'll give them plenty of incentives.

We'll essentially give them access and distribution to all our existing users who are already using our protocols and can see all of their listings that they would put up on the protocol. And then like it's just a no-brainer for someone to use our protocol versus like completely reinventing the wheel and trying to build their own marketplace. It kind of sounds like you're trying to make TensorFlow the A super app on Solana, starting with the first app that you guys built, which is an NFT spot exchange, but then allowing others to build on like additional like modules or like smaller apps,

liquidity apps or, you know, something like this. Is that a way to interpret this? We don't like the term super app too much because we think it's being overused, but I think broadly that's correct. Maybe another way to think about it is, like, think about NFGs. They're very diverse. And, you know, by definition, like, they're non-fungible. They're all very different. And it probably doesn't make sense to have a single UI where a real estate deed trades next to a whiskey bottle, trades next to like a punk to a Madlad. You probably want like verticalized, like catered UIs to different use cases. And we can't build all of them. They're just like fundamentally impossible. But what we can do is build that single unifying liquidity layer that everybody settles back into. So everybody gets the benefit of shared liquidity. And then give people easy building blocks that they can use to spin up their own UIs.

And that way you kind of get the best of both worlds. You know, like you decide to spin up a marketplace for your like-a-s-clication. Well, all the Tensorians are supporting you because you're building on top of tensor. Like we're all get, we all have your bag. Maybe there's a grant for you to build on top of us. We give you all the APIs, we give you the smart contracts, we handhold you. It's just like a lot easier for you as a builder. But at the same time, you're getting that like very dedicated custom experience that is awesome for just your users.

That's how we see the future for NFTs. Yeah. To even add on to that, I wanted to say, I have this like very contrarian thesis. And maybe it's not contrarian in some circles, but I think in Web3, liquidity is not a moat. It is not a sufficient moat. and that is because, like, we oftentimes compare marketplaces in Web3 to Marketplaces in Web 2, and we say that, oh, eBay has a bunch of supply and demand, and that is their moat. But do you think about, like, why that's a moat for eBay?

It's because the friction of switching from eBay to some other, you know, eBay verticalized marketplace is pretty high for both the supply side and the demand side. You think about, like, the supply side, someone who's selling coins on eBay already has this very, like, tried and true process of like one picking the coins that someone's just bought, putting it into the mail and sending it via eBay instructions, right? If you move to a completely different platform, completely changes your process, and so there's no reason for someone to switch from eBay to another marketplace very easily. But you think about like Web3, everything is digital, and it's very easy, everything is digital and composable. All you need is a wallet,

and you can connect permissionlessly to any marketplace. And so if someone can quickly, like, move their liquidity for NFTs from TensorFlow to some other up-and-coming marketplace that's offering a ton of incentives. What I think might be a pretty substantial moat for us going forward is actually the composability aspect of Web3. The reason is if a bunch of developers, if a bunch of DAPs start building on top of your protocol, the friction of switching out the marketplace and integrating with, let's see, another protocol is actually pretty high.

Like the last thing that dialect, who actually built on top of us for their stickers that, you know, people could trade inside their app, if they were to like try to integrate another marketplace, one, it would just add a lot of unnecessary dev work that is not crucial to their business model, which is getting more people in their chat app. And so I think like encouraging composability, actually getting people to build on top of you is probably the biggest moat you can have in Web3 compared to the whole liquidity mode that people talk about a lot. Yeah, I think the way that we articulate the Tepankless is what we call the protocol sync thesis, which is that the protocols that are down in the bottom of the stack,

of a tech stack of composability of composed protocols, you know, money Legos, the ones that are at the bottom are the most sticky. The more apps or more other protocols that are built on top of a deeper protocol, just the more weight that system has, the more just like of a black hole that thing is. You can think of MakerDAO inside of the Ethereum ecosystem is like a very heavy, high gravity, high, like, it's a whirlpool of other apps because everyone's using dye. And so I totally align with that kind of thesis. And that is where, like, ultimately liquidity will flow. And I totally agree, like, liquidity is not the moat, but liquidity flows towards systems that have many, many, many protocols built on top of it. When we talk about

what's at the bottom of the tensor stack, you said that, you know, maybe we shouldn't have real estate and JPEGs be trading right next to each other. That's probably not too appropriate. But at the very bottom, at like the center of the black hole, what are the things being shared by like any or all NFTs? Like what are the contracts that are, do have some sort of just like network effects to them? And maybe what are the contracts that maybe are after that that maybe don't share everything but still share some things like where do like some of the network effects actually come from? Yeah. I'd say probably the way it's set up right down is at the very, very bottom, right on top of Solana's runtime, you have the standards themselves.

The most popular standard on Solana is Metaplex. That's the one that everybody uses right now. It supports things like programmable NFTs, compressed NFTs via bubblegum, a bunch of other things. And so that's kind of the very first layer. Right above that sits our spot exchange contract. And we have a couple of those, one for compressed NFTs, one for what we call legacy see NFTs, and we can talk about the differences later if you want to, but basically like different types of NFTs, spot exchange contracts. And then what goes on top of that is another layer of

contracts. And that's the contracts that do the more interesting stuff. It's the product that Richard mentioned that we're going to be releasing shortly. It's a couple other ones that we have out there, one for like gaming, but it's kind of really the more creative stuff that sits on top of that. Right. Before we were talking about the assets and then we were talking about the financialization, the actual like app. Exactly. Right. Exactly.

Yeah. And so one big thing for TensorFlow in 2024 is going to be open sourcing and decentralizing all of those contracts. That's probably the biggest roadmap item for us heading into this year. Maybe to answer your question about like where are the network effects coming from. The concrete example is if dialect builds on top of us, then any listings or bids that TensorFlow users place on TensorFlow. to dot trade show up in the dialect app.

And any trades that dialect users place in their app shows up on TensorFlow. So you start building this network of users that are each using DAPs separately, right? They may be overlapping. And for the most part on Solana right now, there's a lot of overlap, which is fine. But you can imagine that as this network grows, there's going to be more and more distroint set of users. But all of them don't really need to think about what the other users are doing. All they care about is, if I list my number,

Do I get the maximum distribution? Do I get the maximum number of buyers who will buy an NFT? If I place the bid, do I get the maximum number of sellers who maybe own an NFT from that collection that can sell into my bid? So that's really the network effect is actually this user graph between all the different apps. Mantle, formerly known as BitDAO, is the first Dowled web3 ecosystem, all built on top of Mantle's first core product, the Mantle Network, a brand new high-performance Ethereum Layer 2, built using the OP stack, but uses eigenlayers' data evasive.

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and now something big is happening. Introducing the Cello Layer 2. It's a game-changing proposal that's going to bring Sellow's rapidly growing ecosystem home to Ethereum. Vitalik has shared its excitement for the Cello Layer 2. on the cello forum, so has Ben Jones from optimism. But why? The cello layer two will bring huge advantages, like a decentralized sequencer, off-chain data availability, and one block finality. What does all that mean? Rock solid security, a trustless bridge to Ethereum, and more real-world

use cases for Ethereum without compromise. And real-world adoption is happening. Active addresses on cello have grown over 500% in the last six months. With the cello layer two, gas fees will stay low and you can even pay for gas using ERC-20 tokens. But cello is a community-governed This means that SELO needs you to weigh in and make your voice heard. Join the conversation in the Sello Forum. Follow at Selloorg on Twitter and visit cello.org to shape the future of Ethereum. Let's dive into the roadmap a little bit more. Richard, you already tease an app a feature of product that's coming soon, TM to the TENCOR vertical.

Just maybe some more things like that. What are some near-term features, some, you know, things that you guys are focusing on in like the, you know, six months to 18 months time horizon? Probably the biggest thing for us right now is open sourcing, decentralized protocols. And that's a lot of work, because like any good startup,

when we were building them, we took shortcuts because we wanted to get to market faster. And now that we're trying to make it a public piece of infrastructure, you kind of have to rewrite certain parts. That's what we're doing right now. Once that is out, there's another probably three, six months of like getting the docs in order,

spying up APIs, working with other providers, to support them and just building a developer community, right? That thing doesn't just come together by itself. So like a monumental piece of work, pretty excited for it, but that's probably like the biggest thing. And then other than that, I would say the second priority for this year is going to be exploring advanced financialization of NFTs.

There's a lot of new assets that are coming on chain very, very fast. That includes digital native assets and real world assets. You guys talk about that a lot. and they're going to come to Solana the same, they're going to come to Ethereum, and we want to be in a position to offer interesting financial products for those assets when they're here.

Something that's happened in the Solana world was the Gito AirDrop, and to my interpretation of the Gito AirDrop, it was an air drop that completely changed the entire Solana ecosystem. It wasn't just about Gita, it was really about, and there was like a before Gito

and an after Gito for Solana. How was that experience for you guys at Tensor? Once the Gito drop was dropped, how did things change? I'm assuming activity went up, users went up, a volume went up. What was that like? Yeah, we're pretty close to the Gito guys. They're awesome. They're probably the top 1%, if not 0,4, 1% of builders that we met in this space.

And they're just hardcore, like, validate. They know everything about the Salon of the Salon client. They've built this like Mev add-on or module on top of the salon of the salon of client. They're rock stars. And like the success of the Gito Air Drop just like, is a testament to how well they've executed, and they've, like, grown their market share of clients from, like, 0% to, like, 40% within a couple, within, like, a year, if not just over a year. When it comes to the air drop, and just like air drops in general that are successful on Solana,

what that does the entire ecosystem is it almost creates this infusion of capital. One from people who are interested in Solana, but they haven't really dove into it. But when they hear about this massive Gito AirDrop that happens to reach, you know, certain exchanges outside of Solana that are not Dex's, that draws in a lot of excitement and attention. And that's great because now people are interested in Solana. They're like, oh, what's this Gito client that these Gito guys are building? Oh, look, this Solana blockchain is actually, you know, it's legitimate.

It offers a different value prop than Ethereum. And they're really great builders who are doing cool stuff here. let me move my capital, let me move some of my capital from maybe other blockchains into Solana and started experimenting with the chain. And so what we saw ultimately afterwards was that a lot more people started training NFTs. There was actually the volume increased, I want to say like 2.3X. Our user count increased by 2.3X. And that was all within a couple of weeks before and during and after the Gito Air drop.

Did that change anything about what you guys needed to prioritize or focus on? in terms of products or did like, did anything get like stress tested? What did you learn from from that experience? Yeah, everything got stress tested. There were parts of the backup that had to be basically rebuilt pretty much and immediately. We definitely had a couple late nights. But that's, you know, that's a startup for you. You built for your current user size and then you discovered it all over breaks when you 10X.

So we're very lucky to have that problem. And I think other than that, it just like, even Salad itself, off, right? What was put to the test, like the fee markets that Solana has developed. I think there's no questions about whether they work exactly the way they should or whether you can do them better. Again, like, I think both Salana and also just lucky you have users and the more of them we have, the more we'll discover what breaks and rebuild it to make it better. Talk to me about the Ten Sorians. So first, explain what they are and maybe the decision as to why to make them in the first place. Yep. So there are three, I guess. I think,

I think big benefits that we've discovered by launching an NFT collection. So basically what we did, I want to say back in... Tentorians, they're an NFT collection. They're the NFT collection of Tensore, right? And so, yeah, just wanted to drop that context in there. Yeah, it's our 10K PFP collection that we launched back in, I want to say, November of 2023, maybe even earlier. Lost track of dates.

It doesn't matter. But we essentially... Almost... We essentially gave these Tensort... to all the people that have been trading and using tensor for, you know, the past year before that drop for the Tensorians. And one of the biggest reasons of doing this is we wanted to, one, reward diehard users who have been around stuck with us since the very beginning when we were 0% market share and we

had nothing more than just like a fancy UI that was different. We wanted to reward them with something that was tangible and something that I can like, they can rep on their Twitter pfp and say like, hey, I was here first. I was one of the early users of Tensor, and so I got a Tensorian, and here it is to the world. Two, it actually almost becomes a growth hacking strategy

where now you have a bunch of users who got this Tensorian for free, essentially. And they want to rep it because they want to show that they were early. They supported Tensors since the beginning, and they're putting this on their Twitter PFP. Now, every person who sees their profile on Twitter, sees this really interesting PFP and start to ask questions like, oh, where is this from?

Who created them? Why is this? Why do four or five out of every, four or five out of every 10 salami users have this as their PFP? And I think that draws intrigue and it gives us attention. And then people start looking at a tensor. They start wondering, oh, it's a NFT marketplace that's starting to climb up in market chair.

Let me try it out. Let me see if this is actually a product that I would use. Making a PFP collection is a completely different skill set from making an NFT marketplace that is high-performance with a financial backend. You have to do the properties, you have to do the arts, right? Like this is very, very far away from probably what you guys would consider your core competency.

Talk about that experience of doing something like pretty different and new than just building an NFT marketplace. Was that hard? I would lie if I said it was easy. But I think looking back is probably worth it. And it taught us a lot about how our customers work and think. Because we basically became our own customers, if you think about it. That's maybe like another out of the benefit of having consortions

is that we can basically try a lot of stuff that we imagine for NFT projects ourselves. Right. Even this new product will be testing it with consortians. But yeah, it's a different skill set. I will say that our team is kind of weird. we're like a bit of a barbell where on one hand we're like very very technical and we like enjoy but on the other side we're like very degen and we can't enjoy like the reason we're in this market is because to be honest it's just kind of fun and we're kind of like doing it and so I think a part of

us was we kind of had the degen skill set too to do a collection but yeah I'd be lying if I said that there wasn't stuff that you know kept us up at night and just figuring out like how do you do the art how do you like make sure the drop goes smoothly we also wear this is one of the one of mentioning. So, Consorance was the first ever 10K BFP Compressed Collection. And Compressed NFTs are these like super cheap NFTs in Solana that now are pretty popular. But back of when we, we were doing it like nobody has done it. And so we were, we were writing all that infrastructure ourselves. It basically didn't exist, except for like some work that Dialect and Heles and a couple others have done before. And so we sort of like, we were both taking on like commercial and

technical risk, I guess, with the project. But yeah, here we are. Ilya, you were talking earlier about just one of the big things that is on your 2024 priority list is like, you know, hardening down the system and being ready for decentralization. And when you give your community an NFT, a PFP NFT, you actually kind of give them like a face, like a uniform to wear, an identity to rally around. And I would imagine that once this PFP gets out there and

and you give a way for your community to express their alignment with tensor, they're where the tensor, like flag, for example, all of a sudden you give them a way to express their identity as a collective, and they get to have a voice as a collective. And it probably starts to become independent from, you know, any sort of top-down statement of leadership or, you know, they get to have their own kind of sovereignty and their own community. But how has the Tensorian tribe evolved?

What are they like? Who are they? I think initially we had obviously a lot of traders who were perhaps maybe a bit more mercenary to some extent where they saw Ten Sorians as, oh, cool, I got something for free. I'm going to flip it and just leave the community. I think over time, the Tenorian identity and the collection has almost rallied behind the idea that were a,

Solana first NFT marketplace and eventually NFT financial stack. We're trying to push the boundaries of what can be done with NFTs on Solana. For example, all of our work that we put in to supporting Compress NFTs, that's a very uniquely Solana thing. And we were one of the first ones to jump on it, if not the first marketplace, to jump on it. And I think that's what people are rallying behind in that we're double downing on Solana and seeing what we can do on this chain. And that is basically what our community has become. It's everyone who believes strongly and Solana, the future of Solana, why it's going to be one of the top L-1s, one of the highest throughput battle-tested L-1s out there.

And they just want to support us on the way. They just want to support Tenser and achieving our vision for NFTs. I think people get into the crypto, often because of speculation or like somebody told the number would go up. But actually, unironically, or ironically, I think a lot of people stay because they find a sense of identity. I think they find people that they have more in common with than some of the other folks in their life.

And that's a very unique period in human history where that is happening. Like, if you think about it before COVID, that was kind of like not a thing. Then COVID kind of took things online. And then these NFTs, they popped right after. There was a reason for that. I think people were lost.

A lot of people were lost. And I think this is one thing in crypto that gets me out of bed excited, is that I think there's more people in the world now that feel a sense of belonging than before NFTs and crypto. Yeah, and just to go down in memory lane, that's actually kind of the thing that I saw happening

in the Salana community during the FTX implosion where you saw some of just like the pain and the frustration in the Salana community at that moment, but you also never really saw, you saw a lot of them experience the same emotions because, you know, that was pain. But when I saw it, like, oh, there's a handful of Solana people that are still in my feet and they're all kind of experiencing and expressing the same things. Like, oh, that's, that's a tribe. That's what a tribe is. And that's when I kind of saw like, oh, like, you know, if Salana doesn't go to zero, it's going back up in that present moment. And that's kind of exactly what happened over the following year where, like, Solana's, like, chewed glass for a whole year. And the, the foundations of the Salana Applayer grew from, like, you know, it's rudimentary primitive state to a, very expressive ecosystem that now can support their own sub-communities.

As we move forward into 2024, you know, it's like January, we got the whole rest of the year. What makes you guys optimistic about the Solana ecosystem, just zooming out beyond TensorFlow. What's to be excited about in the Solana world? I think maybe what changed since last year is, one, when we're seeing all of this momentum coming back into the ecosystem, the chain has performed exceptionally well. in that, well, not exceptionally well, there are obviously like kinks, sometimes rejections don't go through, but we're not seeing sort of the liveliness failures that we saw last year when there were a lot of Dijan min's happening and that took down DFI and other stuff.

Why is that important? And that's because I think Salada might be one of the only high throughput chains that have seen this much traffic and activity come out the other end and are now able to withstand all of the past liveliness failures that happen during the bull run. And if you think about just the outlook of crypto in general, I think we're coming out of this bear market. People are starting to get more optimistic about more like higher risk assets and especially crypto like eating the world and making people bankless.

And I think like it's really important for us to have solid battle tested infrastructure so that we can continue onboarding the next million people, the next hopefully billion people. I think Solana is one option. I think all the other Ethereum L2s are also, like, they're doing spectacular work in terms of scaling up Ethereum. I think Solana will, has enough momentum going that they will continue to survive and draw more DAP developers, draw more developers in general to build on top of it, build cool consumer apps. I can't tell you, like, what specific consumer app is going to take off and what I'm bullish on specifically. But I think the, the fundamentals are there for Solana to take off.

Yeah, what would you say? I think for a fire dancer is going to be pretty exciting. I think that's when Solano transitions from the way totally calls it beta to Alpha, because you're going to have multi-client now. I think that's pretty important. I think it's also like taking what Solano was built for and taking it to the logical extreme.

And so seeing how that plays out and what use cases that opens up is going to be pretty exciting. I think for us, like, crypto-natives, the use cases that we think a lot about, they actually don't require that much throughput. Like, how many transactions are realistically going to send an hour? But there's a whole swath of use cases that are not human-based or human-executed. They're machine executed, right? So machines exchanging value in, like, small increments back and forth.

Like, maybe one day your meter is sitting on the wall is trading back and forth with the electric grid depending on the time of day and, you know, your solar panels are either paying into the grid or you're taking it from the grid. And I think all of those use cases require basically what Fire Dancer is going to do to Solano, like a super high throughput, like almost zero cost transaction chain. And I think the world that unlocks is just a very fascinating world. I think the future our kids will have, like, and the world they'll live in, in part because of this technology will just be completely different. So before, we get to that world.

Solan is currently going through kind of like an air drop season. Is Tenor going to join that air drop season? No comment. Nothing? We can't comment, but we can say that we believe in

Repri and we believe in the power of decentralization and we think that people that have supported us from day one should go through that process with us. If people are interested in learning about TENSER, maybe this is probably, this can be largely Ethereum listeners

and then the few Solana listeners that come to bankless whenever we do some Salaana content, I'm sure they've already heard of Tensor and have used it, but if people want to learn more, where should they go? Probably the best place to start off with is just our Twitter. So it's Twitter.com slash tensor underscore HQ. that's where we post most of our big announcements. So when we do our big feature job next week, there's going to be a massive thread,

hopefully get a lot of engagement, and I'll just walk you through this really cool product. That, to our knowledge is pretty novel when it comes to the DeFi NFT space across all of crypto. I think, frankly, like the best way to learn more about TensorFlow is just listening to more podcasts that we've done in the past, because that's where we distill most of the high-level information. into easily listenable packets, you know, usually within, you know, one hour, you can listen to it while you're working. You can listen to it while you're, you know, exercising or going on a run.

That's probably the best way to learn about the high level of tensor. And of course, once you like TensorFlow, you could join our Discord. You could join, you know, our district community is probably the biggest community where most of the TensorFlow users are communicating back and forth. and that's where you get the really like bottoms up feeling of what tensor is. I have one more thing to add to that. I think everybody should fill their Salada wallet with exactly $1. Go on TensorFlow to a collection called drip.

There's a number of them pick any, it doesn't matter, and sweep 10 on their fees. And I think you'll feel the magic of Solana. I think you'll feel the magic of TensorFlow. There's really nothing that comes close to it. We can talk about it all day long. But until you go and do that, And it's going to cost you $1. It's worth your time.

You're just not going to understand what we're talking about. But once you see it and you see those like 10 transactions that you're doing, just like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, within like a couple seconds if you're on the screen, it's just a magical feeling. I think everybody should do that. Awesome, guys. Well, we'll get all those links in the show notes and Richard.

After this episode's done, I'll go and ask you for your favorite podcast episodes to get those in there as well. Ilya, Richard, thank you guys so much for joining me on Bankless. I enjoyed exploring the TensorFlow ecosystem on Solana today. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. What's fun. Bankless Nation, you know the deal.

Crypto is risky. NFTs are risky. All ecosystems are risky. You can lose what you put in. But we are head west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.