The Ultimate Guide to Develop an NFT Marketplace

An NFT marketplace is similar to an e-commerce site, in which people will come and find their goods for making purchases. To generate the best NFT marketplace, businesses need to go through some steps and instructions to build an NFT marketplace with helpful functionality and user-friendly features. 

Let’s begin the blog with insights into what NFT marketplace is all about.

NFT stands for non-fungible token, which is declared as unique and non-interchangeable data placed on a blockchain. Thus, art, music, video, in-game items, special sports recordings, a digital collectible, essay, or anything else can be minted as NFTs for trading.

To sell or purchase digital assets, we need a marketplace as a gateway to join in transactions from art to entire virtual worlds. NFT marketplaces can be considered as online platforms where users can search for items and make purchases. There are various NFT marketplaces, so it depends on your demands to choose a platform or create your own “niche” platform to trade based on category.

NFT marketplace has been proved to rise briefly to be a promising business, more and more brands in different categories are jumping onto the train of blockchain technology. Especially in 2021, NFTs’ market grew to $41 billion and nearly approached the total value of the global fine art market. The NFT capitalization is the great proof of an industry expansion as it achieved the number of $828 million in 2022.  
 

Here are the proofs of the efficiency for the NFT marketplace.

• Jack Dorsey’s first Twitter tweet was sold for 3$ million.
• NFT tokens in gaming and art rose to millions of dollars in 2021.
• Top Shots, an NBA trading card system, is valued more than $230 million.
• Band Kings of Leon successfully sold their music in the form of NFT for 2$ million in 2021.
• The character #6965 in the CryptoPunk, which is one of the first non-fungible token projects developed on the Ethereum blockchain, was sold for 1.54$ million in 2021.

Put simply, NFT marketplace is stated to be the same as an e-commerce platform where users can choose one online store and start shopping. For a clear demonstration of how the NFT marketplace works, let’s go through the basic steps in the process of functionality. 

First thing first, you have to sign up for the account to enter the marketplace. The process to become a trader requires users to provide their email addresses, phone numbers, social media credentials and some other necessary information. It just takes a few minutes of time, just like any other applications for buying and purchasing.

After signing up for a user identity, buyers and sellers have to link the NFT marketplace application to their crypto wallet. This is the essential step to set up the payment method for your transactions. For a broader client base, marketplaces may cover several crypto currencies wallet providers such as MyEtherWaller, Wallet Connect, MetaMask, etc.

• Enlist the NFTs: When you want to sell your digital assets in any NFT marketplace, you have to mint these with the description of name, price, status and other relevant information.
• Auction: Once done listing the NFTs, you can auction your items with fixed price listings or declining listings.
• Trading: If you are the one who registers in the whitelist, you can have the opportunity to own the NFT and save them in your wallet. Just like any other trading platform, you can find the suitable items and make your purchases.

Smart contracts are generated to define the conditions of a transaction between a buyer and a seller. These conditions are embedded into a self-executing digital contract contained on the secured blockchain network. The contract verifies the transaction and becomes irrevocable triggering the next action once the buyer satisfies the seller's requirements.

NFT marketplace requires the amount of fees for every successful transaction. It comes from the energy costs of brokering the transaction on the blockchain and transferring money into different kinds of cryptocurrencies based on users’ demands.

A user-friendly marketplace is the one which creates simple reach for explicit files and a back-end process that can function complicated transactions smoothly. Therefore, businesses need to focus on both front-end and back-end to develop an excellent NFT marketplace. And the 8 features below are what you can follow to build an NFT marketplace for your business.

The storefront of an NFT marketplace needs to be impressive and intuitive to attract users in the very first seconds. The marketplace administrator must choose which to display and how much information for each file. Provenance, authenticity of files and a listing of the rarity of NFTs are what traders want to be informed about as artists can release several NFTs for the same piece of art with a label like ”Number 2 of 10”.

The search function makes the buying process much easier. Whatever you list on your marketplace, specific niche or general NFTs, a tool for searching items in the scope of the files for trading must be included when developing your own NFT site. 

NFT buyers would have different tastes in investment, so to improve user experience on your NFT site, searching by filters should be considered to sort items by essential categories such as price, rarity, artist, time.

A listing of NFT items would make it simple to have an overview of what buyers and sellers can buy on your marketplace. A well-designed NFT development provides a step-by-step path and uploading instructions as well as forms that provide selling information.

Verified items on an NFT marketplace are attractive to collectors. For sellers, the marketplace can display information such as how many people have viewed the file and how many bids have been placed during an auction. While, buyers want to know that a file has gone through an authentication process before they make a purchase.

The back-end work for an auction, however, is more difficult than for regular sales. Bidding may be fierce, especially at the conclusion of the auction, and the site must give real-time information about the process. On the other hand, buying and selling directly is a simpler procedure thanks to the number of participants. All of them should use smart contracts on blockchain for more development, safety and payment gateways.

Your NFT marketplace should allow users to connect with their current crypto wallet solutions. It not only broadens user experience to ease their concern about the security of their crypto wallets, but also increases the opportunities for collaborating with multiple wallet providers.

People have the intention to do business with and trust in those who have strong reputations. A rating system can also prevent negative behaviors like false representation or backing out of a transaction before the smart contract goes into effect. Besides, ratings would also help businesses to engage better with customers and develop to complete their site in the near future.

If you are about to create your own NFT marketplace, consider these step below:

Businesses should target the right audience. If that NFT is only suitable for a certain group of customers, choosing the niche is suggested when betting on a vertical market. Horizontal market works when businesses decide to offer everything to everyone in different categories.

Project and design documentation would work as a guideline for all activities in the platform creation process. You may waste your time with unclear instructions and make the in-house team be confused about the whole product if you do not define your project in the first steps.

Once finalizing your NFT marketplace concept, it is time to put your plan into action. Examine the possibilities and select a framework that meets your commercial and technical objectives. To ensure outstanding performance and trustworthiness, some may consider employing experienced NFT developers or an NFT marketplace development business to save time and money.

When setting up an NFT marketplace with the base of blockchain, the back-end development is totally distinct because the internal logic has to be converted into separate parts. Moreover, the transactions’ files would be confirmed and certificated on blockchain in a decentralized way. 

The last thing you need to do before launching the NFT marketplace is testing and deploying. Checking the platform ensures that your product executes the way it was planned and eliminates bugs or software errors. You have to be in users’ shoes and try to feel them when you are on your NFT site. Start asking questions and forecast the next steps users would do when buying and selling.

After making sure about the pre-launch support to confirm the system’s credibility and performance, you can start working on your NFT marketplace. Also, you should calculate the development price further and measure the performance of both front-end and back-end processes.

You may wonder how much it costs for generating an NFT marketplace. The answer depends on the amount of work spent on the project and the platform you choose to finalize your price. Other factors which are tools, templates, customization, the complexity of features displayed on your site (UI/UX creative, security, pages, user profiles, notifications, management panels, etc.) contribute to get the exact cost for NFT marketplace development. 

Before dwelling on developing an NFT marketplace, plan the budget by knowing the requirements and expectations since creating the NFT marketplace from zero to hero needs more cost compared to choosing the existing NFT marketplace development. Therefore, to get the precise cost of developing the NFT marketplace and helpful consultation, approach the company experiencing in providing digital solutions.

Before launching your own NFT marketplace, here are top 3 marketplace developments that you can examine and refer to.

You can have a look at Crypto.com, which is the blockchain-powered platform for creating, displaying, buying and selling NFTs. Crypto.com has published their NFT marketplace since 2021 and covered the categories of art, gaming, celebrities, sports, music. It is considered to be the overall best NFT marketplace in 2022 and trusted by over ten million people.

NFT Launchpad is a good reference for features displayed with easy-to-use interface with clear sections which perfectly follows the users’ touch points. Although it has just been launched in February 2022, NFT Launchpad has started offering collections from various top creators in the exciting approach.

OpenSea is said to be the first mainstream platform and the top NFT marketplace with a huge asset selection. It has reached over one million users and successfully generated a high level of trading volume built on the Ethereum blockchain with various NFT types such as art, domain names, game items.

An intense number of firms are joining the game of NFT marketplace development, which promises a pool of opportunities and competitions. To achieve the benefits from launching an NFT site, businesses should determine their target customer and demands of features on the platform to grow the user-friendly experience and the trading process. Consequently, the cost development service can be estimated and efficiently spent to build an NFT marketplace for the new playground of transactions.

To be fully informed about the service of developing an NFT marketplace, contact Spirit Labs and visit our website www.spiritlabs.co for the consultation.

REFERENCES:

• Article: Best NFT Marketplace – Where to Buy NFTs
• Blog: Here’s A Complete Guide For NFT Marketplace Development
• Blog: An Ultimate Guide To NFT Marketplace Development
• Blog: DEVELOPING AN NFT MARKETPLACE: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE
• Blog: Marketplace