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We recorded a Lightspeed podcast episode with Multicoin’s Kyle Samani today, and it got me pretty excited for the panel we’re doing with Anatoly Yakovenko at DAS. Be sure to grab your tickets while they’re still hot. Oh, and use the code LIGHTSPEED10 for 10% off at checkout. 

Today, we’ve got TNSR’s new revenue source, stablecoin stickiness, and a market cycle poll.

Tensor’s memecoin app Vector to send 50% of revenue to TNSR treasury

The Solana NFT marketplace Tensor will now split revenue from its social trading app, Vector, between the TNSR treasury and Tensor’s developer shop.

Vector is a mobile social trading app with a built-in crypto wallet that lets users broadcast their trades to other users. With Vector adopting TNSR, the Tensor Foundation — which oversees Tensor’s token — will “steward” the protocols powering Vector, although Tensor’s labs entity will build the product. 

50% of Vector’s revenue is set to go to the TNSR treasury, which can be used for things like airdrops and grants. The other half of the revenue will go to Tensor.

Vector is a bit like if Robinhood and X had a baby that loved memecoins. The app is still invite-only, but it is currently earning more than $90 million in annualized revenue from a 1% trading fee, which would be 10x the revenue Tensor earns from its NFT marketplace, Tensor said. A Flipside dashboard suggests Vector has between 4,000 and 5,000 daily returning wallets. 

Tensor co-founder and CEO Ilja Moisejevs told me the company launched Vector because it saw the NFT sector dying out and wanted to pivot to a “1000x larger market” in memecoins. 

For context, Tensor’s NFT platform earned $9 million in marketplace trading revenue over the past year, according to NFT Pulse. Memecoin launchpad pump.fun made $9 million in revenue yesterday.

For now, the Tensor Foundation treasury will only accrue value from Vector, but Moisejevs told me that in the future the platform’s community could vote to do something like buy back and burn tokens, as the DEX aggregator Jupiter just did.

In any event, TNSR holders will hope the new revenue stream can help turn around the token’s trajectory. TNSR launched at $1.70 in April 2024, according to CoinGecko, and it now trades at $0.39 — despite the whole crypto president being elected thing that happened in between. 

Key to that turnaround will be Vector cracking the code of social trading, which has been attempted before in crypto to limited success. 

“What we think is different this time is a) memecoins are inherently social and b) we found a form factor for shared trades that people actually like,” Tensor co-founder and CTO Richard Wu said in a statement.

— Jack Kubinec

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The stablecoins are sticking around: 

As we covered last week, President Trump’s decision to launch his memecoin on Solana brought a lot of USDC stablecoins to the blockchain. But even though TRUMP has slumped, the stablecoins haven’t left the chain — and actually increased to over $11 billion this week.

The merits of Trump’s personal crypto exploits are highly debatable, but stablecoin supply tends to be sticky, so Solana fans can at least thank the president for that.

— Jack Kubinec

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Ryan Connor, research manager at Blockworks Research: