Building An NFT Marketplace: What You Need To Know

Non-fungible tokens (NFT) have been gaining popularity and will continue to draw attention in 2022. As NFTs become popular, so is another service – the NFT marketplace.

So what do you need to know before you start developing a marketplace for exchanging NFT and building a strong community?

Table of contents

Understanding NFT

If you haven’t heard of NFT by now, they are basically digital assets. You can monetize any digital creations that sell for thousands of dollars. The thing that makes NFT special is that it exists on the Blockchain. In layman’s terms, you can keep track of its ownership and originality. The development of NFT has helped countless creators to improve income and gain popularity.

As NFTs are assets, the need to store and exchange NFTs becomes inevitable. Experts expect NFT marketplace to grow in 2022, so developing your own platform would be a huge opportunity.

Things you need to know before developing an NFT marketplace

First, determine your marketplace’s niche. There are many large NFT marketplaces such as Open Sea resembling Amazon where you can buy various types of NFTs, however, you should develop a marketplace for specific assets like memes, pixel arts,… so you know exactly who your users are and become the first marketplace that provides full-service experience for these users.

Second, understand the UI/UX flow of an NFT marketplace from the user side. Almost every NFT marketplace will start with a user login interface, then users can connect a crypto wallet to the marketplace to buy and sell NFTs. Next, users can upload NFTs and start selling for a fixed price or bidding and auctioning. A transaction is created when the marketplace launches a smart contract for a user wallet.

Third, determine the features of your NFT marketplace. Some of the general features of an NFT marketplace include a storefront similar to that of an e-commerce website, filters to search for specific NFTs, listings, selling mechanisms like buying and auctioning, a review system, etc. Specialized marketplaces should offer more services depending on what type of NFT their users sell.

Tech Stack needed to build an NFT Marketplace

So what do you need if you’re thinking about developing your own NFT marketplace? Keep in mind 4 key factors: blockchain platform, storage platforms, smart contract deployment tools, and front-end programming.

Blockchain Platforms

Ethereum
Ethereum is one of the most popular platforms when it comes to NFT marketplace or non-fungible token development. Since transaction history and token metadata is publicly verifiable on Ethereum, it is easier to prove ownership history.As all Ethereum products share the common backend, NFTs become portable across products. Also, Ethereum never goes down; therefore, tokens will always be available for sale.
Flow
Flow is a rapid and decentralized blockchain designed for a new generation of digital assets, apps and games. Developers use Flow to create both the NFT marketplace and NFTs using the Cadence programming language.
Tezos
Tezos is an open-source blockchain platform for applications and assets backed by a community of builders, researchers and validators. Using a pre-compiled FA2 NFT contract written in LIGO smart contract language, Tezos supports the development of NFT marketplaces and NFTs.
Cardano
Cardano is a blockchain platform with technologies and tools required to provide unmatched security and sustainability to decentralized systems and applications. It also supports the development of NFTs and other digital assets.

Storage Platforms

IPFS
IPFS is a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol designed to store media content in a decentralized way. As the media file related to NFTs cannot be stored directly on the blockchain, IPFS can store all that data.
Filecoin
Filecoin is a decentralized storage network designed specifically to store the most critical information, such as media files. The storage platform includes everything that a developer will require to get started with decentralized storage for NFTs. Knowing its benefits, Truffle Suite has also launched NFT Development Template with Filecoin Box.
Pinata
Pinata is also one of the popular platforms to upload and manage files on IPFS. It provides secure and verifiable files for NFTs.

Smart contract deployment tools

Developers use a variety of frameworks such as Drizzle, Ganache, and Truffle to test the pre-programmed software. It also manages the digital collectibles stored by investors on the Ethereum blockchain.
Other frameworks like Brownie, Hardhat, and OpenZeppelin are also put to use for investors to compile and interact with smart contracts.

\"\" — *Smart contracts are the same as normal contracts, but decentralized*

Front-end programming for NFT Marketplace

Developers prefer to use Javascript language and its frameworks to do modern front-end development. React, Angular and Vue are all Javascript frameworks, but depending on developer skills and project requirements, developers can choose either or all of them.

The bottom line

Developing an NFT marketplace is one of the most popular services nowadays and you can either build it on your own, or outsource it to professional developers to save time, energy and money. But on the occasion you do decide to DIY it, this article has compiled the basics of what you need to know. Hope we helped!