So, you have heard of NFTs. The acronym stands for non-fungible tokens. Daily, NFTs are getting more acquainted among people for their glaring potential in the future. You can use NFTs for different purposes. Virtual products, digital assets, collectable art, etc., are most used by NFTs. However, offline products are gradually gaining popularity in the scope of NFT.
With this gain in popularity, NFTs’ demand for a regulated standard has grown. To satisfy the demand, the NFTs are now minted according to the ERC standard. This standard enables NFT marketplaces to trade NFTs. So, it can be said that developing an NFT marketplace is an obvious way to get into the blockchain market.
This article will narrate how to make an NFT marketplace. It will also discuss the must-have features and technologies of an NFT marketplace.
Table of Contents
What is an NFT Marketplace?
How Does an NFT Marketplace Work?
How Does OpenSea Work?
Is it Costly to Build an NFT Marketplace like OpenSea?
Essential Features of an NFT Marketplace
How to Create an Online NFT Marketplace Like OpenSea
What is an NFT Marketplace?
NFT marketplaces are virtual blockchain-based platforms. These platforms are where NFT buyers and sellers come to exchange their NFTs. These marketplaces are quite advanced compared with traditional crypto exchange platforms. For example, traditional crypto exchanges only let users trade different crypto assets. NFT marketplaces are more than that. They provide users or artists with NFT minting opportunities. NFT trades execute on a p2p system that guarantees features like pristine transparency, zero risk of the counterparty, and cost-free service.
Another function that an NFT marketplace uses is the blockchain smart contract which preserves the ownership data of NFTs. That’s why developers must create smart contracts and provision NFT minting features for developing NFT marketplaces.
How Does an NFT Marketplace Work?
NFT marketplace is for storing, creating, and trading different non-fungible tokens. These platforms are decentralized and dedicated systems to trade and sell digital assets like art, paintings, videos, animations, music, games, texts, and domains. Moreover, the NFT marketplace is not limited to only these virtual products. It also gives access to owning or selling tokens for autos, collectables, real estate, furniture, tech products, etc.
You can understand the nature of the NFT marketplaces if you consider them typical online shops. Users must subscribe first, choose a product, and purchase it following a specific course of action. NFT marketplaces work similarly, except they have a smart contracts system. Smart contracts offer all the operations and data of a deal encrypted in the blockchain. That’s why the security of a deal is guaranteed when the smart contract is reliable. Integrating the whole idea into a blockchain is not as simple.
How Does OpenSea Work?
OpenSea is committed to enabling artists and entrepreneurs by shifting the conception and understanding of digital ownership. It also supports the creation of a more open and digital economy for the future.
OpenSea happens to be the world’s first and biggest NFT platform. It is the largest for non-fungible tokens and all types of digital collectables. The NFT marketplace started its journey in 2017 with a start-up funding of approximately $2 million. Here are two common benefits for sellers and buyers in the platform.
Sellers normally get a 2.5% commission on different sales on Opensea. But first, sellers are required to set up their accounts and wallet. After that, they can create and mint their NFTs for selling. The transaction system running with Opensea is a viable and secure process.
Buyers also get a secure way to purchase NFTs. They can purchase collectables from OpenSea. But before, the buyer has to have a buyer account and set up his wallet. In his wallet, he has to pay a fixed price with a sufficient amount of ETH. He can also pay for a bid for an auction of that NFT.
Essential Features of an NFT Marketplace?
Storefront
An essential part of the NFT marketplace is the Storefront. The part serves as the platform catalogue. It shows the amount of NFTs available for selling. It also provides vital information about the creators and the collections. Traders will find data about the present and future auctions. The Storefront also includes information on ongoing and forthcoming auctions. Users can also get the price history of certain NFTs. In addition, it provides all the relevant information of any particular NFT, such as its status, quantity, current price, size of bids, and prior owners.
Robust Search Engine
The development of an NFT marketplace involves the deployment of search capability. To increase consumer readers’ retention and consumer engagement, software programmers must make a simple system item search. So that customers can peruse products with more ease. To achieve this, it is necessary to offer a variety of categories, such as art, domain names, collectables, music, photography, trading cards, sports, and virtual worlds.
Users must have the ability to organize digital assets using a variety of filters. OpenSea lets consumers search different items by status, price, and other criteria. OpenSea additionally offers various NFT-specific filters. To locate a specific unit, like a digital painting, users have the options like oil painting, nature, abstract, etc.
Auction
The ability to make purchases and take part in auctions are among the most important features of any NFT marketplace. Because they make it possible for the NFT marketplace to fulfill its main purpose of facilitating NFT trade, therefore, the project should offer a streamlined auction bidding. Biddings should have a minimum onboarding cost and remove any room for mistakes from the process. Users should be able to manage their bids, submit or delete bids on time and add necessary things to their on-site watchlists.
List Creation
It is essential to allow content creators to readily produce listings. It will help construct an NFT marketplace capable of satisfying the necessity of merchants. A software system must include a page dedicated only to submitting digital items. This page ought to have elements like tags, titles, and descriptions. It is also important for sellers to monitor the progress of their postings.
Wallets
The addition of an electronic wallet gives users the ability to safely store, transmit, and receive NFTs. The number of acceptable wallets varies depending on the quality of a marketplace. But the most important fact about wallets is that they allow storing both cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Therefore, all markets include application programming interfaces (APIs) for joining users’ existing external wallets, like Dapper, WalletConnect, MetaMask, Torus, etc.
Trading History
Since an NFT platform is essentially an auction system, its website must provide comprehensive information on the products’ trading history. It becomes easy to find all transaction information on the platform with trading history. It enables users to confirm that the market is open and accessible. OpenSea provides its users with information on upcoming events, sold products, the selling price, the selling date, the quantity, and data regarding sellers and buyers.
Is it Costly to Build an NFT Marketplace like OpenSea?
To build an NFT marketplace, you will need a set of software engineers along with UX/UI professionals. Such professionals often work on an hourly basis. Depending on the level of expertise of a software professional and the country he lives in, the hourly rate will vary excessively. You might want to hire a mid-level developer to cut the overall cost of developing a giant platform like an NFT marketplace. But it can put the efficacy and quality of the entire platform at stake. You must consider hiring a highly expert developer with a heavy portfolio. It might raise your cost a little, but you will get a world-class NFT marketplace.
Assumed cost of developing an NTF Marketplace platform like the Open Sea:
US, UK — $173,000 – 624,000$
Western Europe — $138,400 – 416,000$
Belarus — $69,200 – 208,000$
So, the developers from Western Europe will charge a bit less to create an NFT marketplace. However, there are some dedicated developing service providers from whom you will get the least rate without compromising the quality of your end product. We, at Codexpro.agency, will deliver you an international standard NFT marketplace at almost one-third of the total cost. Usually, the development cost here is around $25K to $30K.
Technologies We Use to Build an NFT Marketplace and Products
NFT marketplaces are growing and are already known as potential investments. As they are to deal with large crowds of traders, they must serve seamless U/X. Your NFT marketplace should be the best among all the others and we make sure of it. Here are a few technologies we use to build our products and marketplaces
Platform: Blockchain
Programming languages: JavaScript, PHP, Python
Libraries, and frameworks: React, Redux, Django, Django REST Framework, Docker, Kubernetes, FastAPI, Elasticsearch, Memcached, Redis, NGINX, RabbitMQ, Jest, Truffle, Firebase Cloud Messaging, Ganache, Polygon, and Solana
To deliver crucial functionalities while reducing time to market, NFT marketplace our developers can exploit third-party APIs like
Feedback: Discord
Payment gateways: Braintree, PayPal, and Stripe
Crypto wallets: WalletConnect
Data analytics: Google Analytics
How to Build an NFT Marketplace like OpenSea?
If you are planning to create a clone of the OpenSea marketplace, you should begin with the commercial side of things. Your first step should be learning about your target audience. You need to know their problems and dissatisfaction with the current solutions. Then you have to design your solutions to those problems. The following step is to establish the role of the OpenSea-like marketplace as well as the business model you need to develop. Following this, you will be able to move further with the overall development.
Niche Down Your Field
Because the NFT industry is already saturated with innumerable digital platforms, you need to be a little strategic here. You shouldn’t go to war against companies leading the industry. You will struggle to get attention and build trust among people. The general solution is to select a less crowded niche and build the platform based on it. By taking this method, you will be able to initiate a targeted marketing campaign and produce an effective UI design, which will help you save costs and reduce the effort required to attract customers to your newly built NFT platform.
Find a Specialist
Never consider hiring unprofessional or amateur developers. You must seek a powerful development team such as iTechSoftSolution to replicate the OpenSea NFT marketplace. We can execute all the technical aspects of the project. You just have to provide our team with a comprehensive understanding of blockchain technology. Our portfolio has included many of our initiatives on the creation of NFT marketplaces. You can rely on us as we are experts in the Blockchain development field.
Design a Business Model
OpenSea generates revenue via the fees charged for its services. The platform deducts a fee from users’ accounts at the moment of each successful transaction involving a digital asset. The charge is a 2.5% fee. OpenSea gets $2.5 in the event that an NFT costs a total of $100. The platform covers the cost of the transaction via the collection of a fee for gas from both the buyers and the sellers. Since OpenSea began using its blockchain, users have been given the ability to generate NFTs without incurring any fees on the network.
Plan the Prototype and the Design
When designing an NFT marketplace like OpenSea, user experience and user interface (UX/UI) play an important role. They determine whether or not consumers like using the site. Also, it will influence whether or not customers will use the platform to purchase and sell non-fungible tokens or if they will have other options.
Developing the First Functional Product
Once you design the user interface, you now can build the marketplace. At this step, a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) should often be developed. As a result, it enables testing the idea while simultaneously improving the product’s usefulness with a small financial outlay. In addition, MVP makes it possible to reach the marketplace relatively quickly, which is of the utmost importance when releasing a product in such a new and developing industry as NFT.
Deploying the Final Product
To make your NFT platform accessible to the public, you will have to host it either on a local server or in the cloud host. Also, estimating the potential number of users that will utilize the NFT platform is crucial. Then choose a strategy on the basis of this assumption.
It is possible to make it instantly accessible to end-users; however, this is not the optimal choice. The best course of action is to launch a limited marketing campaign in collaboration with influential people or well-known artists. Then, provide incentives like bonuses, discounts, and prizes in the form of NFTs to the first buyers and sellers.
Conclusion
Creating a clone of OpenSea, a marketplace for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), is an excellent way to get started in the realm of NFTs and blockchain technology. You will be able to build your very own marketplace. You will also have different options available to you for making money off of it. So, Suppose you are interested in entering the realm of NFTs and blockchain. In that case, you must engage the finest NFT token creation business so that you can establish an OpenSea marketplace clone that works correctly.
