What's Driving Token Prices? April 10, 2024

TNSR (-11%) - Tensor, was the newest airdrop to hit the market this week, dropping its governance token, TNSR. Tensor, which launched in late 2022, is one of the largest NFT marketplaces on Solana and has frequently been labeled the “Blur of Solana”. Despite this, Solana only makes up about 20%-25% of total NFT trading volume. The TNSR token debuted on Monday at a $1.8B fully diluted valuation, which was higher than competitor BLUR’s valuation at the time. The market has since repriced TNSR, and both tokens sit about equal at $1.57B. However, BLUR, on a fundamental level, outperforms Tensor as it saw $1.35B in volume in March vs Tensor’s $140M.
WHALES (-1.5%) - Whales Market, a pre-launch marketplace for trading tokens, faced a major setback this week as it canceled one of the largest airdrops of the year. The bridging project, Wormhole, issued its $W token last week via Solana only which, unfortunately, caused Whales Market to cancel all open orders that existed on Ethereum for the $W airdrop. However, orders placed on Solana were still able to be settled. It is unclear how many users were impacted by the decision to cancel all Ethereum-based orders, but the move was a blow to Whales, which is still in its infancy.
LDO (+5.1%) - A vote to institute a fee switch for liquid staking protocol Lido, failed this weekend in a close vote of 56% vs 44%. Discussions to distribute fees earned by Lido to tokenholders have been circulating for several months, but this was the first time such a discussion had progressed to a vote. The forum discussions themselves were quite heated, with many arguing that turning on fees was necessary to keep Lido relevant. The opposing side insisted that the DAO retain all earnings and focus on growth instead. 30-day annualized earnings to Lido currently sit at $130M.
XRP (+6.9%) - Last week, payments project Ripple announced it would launch a stablecoin that would “rival USDT and USDC”. While it is unclear how Ripple’s stablecoin would differ from existing solutions (as the design describes a U.S.-denominated token backed 1:1 with cash and cash equivalents), Ripple’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse stated that a stablecoin is the number one thing requested by its user base. If they did launch a stablecoin, Ripple would be up against some fairly stiff competition, such as Tether’s USDT (AUM $107B), Circle’s USDC (AUM $32B), PayPal’s PYUSD (AUM $192M ), and Paxos’s USDP (AUM $147M).

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