What Is Tensor? The Solana NFT Marketplace, Fees and TNSR

Tensor is a trading venue for Solana NFTs — standard NFTs, programmable NFTs (pNFTs) and compressed NFTs. It says it covers more than 30,000 collections ¹. Its focus is speed and order types familiar from token trading: real-time collection pages, bulk buying and selling, and the ability to bid on "any NFT in this collection" instead of one item ¹³. See how NFT marketplaces work for the basics.

It also has a creator side. Project teams claim or verify a collection through the Creator Portal, prove control by linking the project's official X account (and ideally signing with the collection's update-authority wallet), and Tensor staff review the submission ¹.

Buying. You can buy a listed NFT at its price or place a bid. A collection-wide bid works like a limit order: it fills against the first holder who accepts it ³.

Selling. If there is an open bid, you can sell immediately for SOL. Or you list, either at a fixed price or on a "bonding curve" that raises the price after each sale, so a batch of NFTs sells at stepped prices ³.

Market-making (TensorSwap). TensorSwap is an automated market maker for NFTs. You deposit SOL and/or NFTs, set a price range and spacing, and choose your own spread fee from 0% to 25%. The order then buys low and sells high automatically. Because each maker sets its own range, liquidity is concentrated rather than shared ³. The docs list two main risks: impermanent loss, where your order sells out early in a sharp rally, and smart-contract risk ⁵.

Shared escrow. Advanced users can fund many bids from one SOL balance. The catch, which Tensor flags in red: topping up that balance can re-activate old bids you forgot about, and anyone can trigger that re-activation. Purchase caps limit how many NFTs a bid can buy ⁴.

API and SDK. Trading and market-making APIs are available by application; the SDKs are public and open source ⁸.

Per Tensor's fee page, the marketplace charges a 2% fee to the taker — the side that fills an existing order — and 0% to the maker ². Royalties come on top and are also paid by the taker:

• Buying a listing: you pay the listed price + 2% + any enforced royalty.
• Selling into a bid: you receive the bid minus 2% minus any enforced royalty.
• Optional royalties: on collections where royalties are optional, the taker chooses to pay none, half or all, from the checkout panel or settings ².

Enforced royalties follow Metaplex's MIP-1 standard ². Solana network fees are small but separate. TensorSwap makers also earn their own chosen spread ³. Since November 2025, all marketplace fee revenue goes to the TNSR treasury, up from 50% previously ¹¹.

TNSR is Tensor's governance token, launched by the Tensor Foundation on April 8, 2024. Supply is 1 billion: 12.5% went to an initial airdrop, 55% in total is allocated to the community, 27% to core contributors and 18% to future fundraising, investors and advisors ¹⁰. Holders vote on protocol parameters, including fee discounts, and an outside security council of Solana developers reviews changes ¹⁰.

On November 21, 2025 the Foundation bought the marketplace and the Tensorians collection from Tensor Labs ¹¹. At the same time Coinbase agreed to buy Tensor Labs' separate memecoin trading app, Vector.fun, which it said it would shut down; the marketplace and TNSR were not part of that deal ¹¹. The founders joined Coinbase, burned their unvested tokens and relocked their vested TNSR for three more years ¹¹.

Richard Wu and Ilja Moisejevs bootstrapped Tensor with Solana hackathon prize money, opened a private beta in June 2022 and went public the next month ⁹. In March 2023 it raised a $3 million seed round led by Placeholder, with Solana Ventures, Alliance DAO, Big Brain Holdings and Solana co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal participating ⁹.

Tensor does not hold your NFTs or SOL between trades; listings, bids and escrow are handled by on-chain programs you sign for. That also means mistakes stick. Tensor's docs say it does not refund purchases and that verifying an NFT's mint address is the buyer's job; it suggests checking the mint against a collection's published list before buying ⁶. Common risks:

• Fake or wrong items. Collections sometimes change their mint lists, so an NFT can appear under the wrong collection ⁶.
• Wallet display quirks. Phantom has shown small negative transactions after royalty payouts; Tensor says these are fees paid by the sender, not your wallet ⁷. (See our Phantom profile.)
• Phishing. Fake Tensor sites and "airdrop" links target NFT traders. Only connect at tensor.trade, and never share a seed phrase (see phishing).