Coinbase positioned itself as the infrastructure layer for retail cryptocurrency access in 2025, absorbing a team and technology that can accelerate its “every trade” vision.
Solana’s Nov. 21 announcement that it acquired Vector.fun, the fastest-moving DEX aggregator, fits into a pattern of acquiring rails, retiring products, and consolidating speed.
However, the agreement made an unusual exception.
While Coinbase will take over Vector’s team and infrastructure, Tensor Foundation will hold the NFT marketplace and TNSR token. Token holders retain governance rights but lose the assets that justify the token’s existence.
This separation raises the question of why anyone should buy tokens from Coinbase’s platform in the first place, if equity holders gain value from the acquisition while token holders are stripped of their core assets without any compensation.
TNSR was trading at $0.0344 as of November 19, down 92% since the beginning of the year. By November 20th, it had peaked at $0.3650, rising 11 times in 48 hours.
Trading volume jumped from less than $10 million a month to $735 million on November 19th, and reached $1.9 billion on November 20th. As of November 21, TNSR plunged 37.3% in 24 hours to $0.1566, with sales of $960 million.
This pattern suggests a typical front line: someone knows, someone buys, and retailers arrive late.
Logic behind removing Vector from Tensor
Coinbase framed the acquisition as a bet on Solana infrastructure. According to the announcement, Solana DEX trading volume will already exceed $1 trillion in 2025, and Vector’s technology will identify new tokens the moment they are launched on-chain or through a major launchpad.
This speed is important for Coinbase’s DEX trading integration, which needs to compete with the native Solana app, which directly onboards users for high-speed trading.
But Vector wasn’t a standalone product. This is Tensor’s consumer-facing initiative designed to drive the utility of TNSR and bring liquidity back into the NFT market.
Separating the two only makes sense if Coinbase wants an infrastructure without the governance entanglements of holding or backing tokens.
By entrusting TNSR to the Tensor Foundation, Coinbase avoids regulatory exposure while extracting the operational layer that made Vector so valuable.
Token holders are left with a governance token in a market that has just lost its most promising growth driver.
Dragonfly investor Omar Khanji put the disconnect bluntly:
“There is a serious dissonance between Coinbase ‘coining’ everything and paying ‘nothing’ to token holders during the Vector acquisition. TNSR token holders were stripped of their best asset and only got ~$0 in return. If this situation continues, people will stop buying tokens.”
This comment speaks to the huge friction in the dual-class system of cryptocurrencies. Coinbase stock investors can profit when the company acquires technology. Meanwhile, token holders of projects like Tensor are forced to have their assets stripped without coming to the negotiating table.
Infrastructure that enables separation
Account abstraction and modular blockchain architecture allow companies to break down their products into components and take only the parts they need.
Vector’s infrastructure sits between on-chain liquidity sources and user interfaces, routing trades across automated market makers, order books, and liquidity pools.
Coinbase can connect its routing layer to the DEX integration and rebrand the experience as a native feature while discarding Vector’s consumer app.
Solana’s sub-second finality and low transaction costs allow aggregators like Vector to process thousands of transactions per second. This speed is important for meme token launches and NFT mints where price discovery occurs in minutes.
Coinbase now controls its speed advantage, which it can now leverage to compete with Raydium, Orca, and Jupiter for retail order flow on Solana.
The Tensor Foundation maintains an NFT marketplace, a slow-moving, off-the-story, low-margin business that Coinbase likely considers non-core.
What will break if this becomes the standard?
If token holders are constantly stripped of their assets during acquisitions, the incentive to hold governance tokens collapses. The token becomes a short-term bet on the hype cycle rather than a long-term bet on the value of the protocol.
John Charbonneau, co-founder of the investment firm DBA, pointed out the reputational damage as follows:
“If Coinbase sets a precedent for token holders to get tough with Coinbase’s own acquisitions, it will be harder for Coinbase to sell new ICO platforms.As buyers who are currently actively launching ICOs, this raises more questions when doing due diligence on their ICO tokens and the ICO tokens of other platforms moving forward on their own.”
Leading patterns make the problem worse. TNSR’s $1.9 billion trading volume spiked on November 20, the day before the announcement, suggesting that the information had been leaked.
Prior to November 19th, the highest daily TNSR trading volume recorded in 2025 was $83.7 million on March 10th. The 25x increase in trading volume did not just happen on its own.
Perhaps someone bought ahead of the news, and retail traders who were following the pump absorbed exit liquidity once the announcement got out.
Regulatory oversight surrounding insider trading in cryptocurrencies remains inconsistent, but this optics could undermine Coinbase’s position as a clean and compliant entrant for institutional investors.
For years, the company distanced itself from offshore exchanges that operate with looser disclosure standards. The distinction becomes blurred if the company’s acquisition triggers the same frontier patterns that define the pump-and-dump system.
What this means for token launch and platform reliability
Coinbase plans to expand its token listing infrastructure and position itself as the leading location for launching new assets in the US market. Vector’s acquisition undermines that claim.
If developers and early investors know that Coinbase will acquire their technology while leaving token holders with governance depreciation rights, they can structure a deal that favors equity over tokens.
This moves capital formation from a decentralized model back to traditional venture-backed structures where equity holders control exit and token holders provide liquidity without representation.
The alternative would require Coinbase to compensate token holders during the acquisition through token buybacks, stock conversion, or direct payments. None of these options are simple.
Share buybacks may raise securities law concerns. Conversion of shares requires treating the tokens as investment contracts, which Coinbase avoids for regulatory reasons.
Direct payments would set a precedent that all acquisitions would have to include token consideration, limiting Coinbase’s flexibility to cherry-pick infrastructure without governance issues.
Currently, each token launch on Coinbase’s platform carries the implicit risk that the company will later acquire the underlying project, extract valuable assets, and leave token holders with depreciating governance rights.
If Coinbase wants to monopolize token launches, it needs a better answer than “equity holders profit, but token holders do not.” The deal with Vector proves the company doesn’t have that yet. The market will decide whether that matters.
