How to create an NFT marketplace on Solana?

Typically, all NFT market players follow the same procedure. First, the user must create an account on the site and connect his cryptocurrency wallet to it, which is used as a place for storing created and purchased NFTs and as an authorization key on the website. After that, users can create their own NFTs on this site and attach to them ( video, images, gifs, audio, texts and other ) files that they want to tokenize.

The next step in the process is to put NFT on sale on the market of marketplace. The user can choose the type of sales ( fixed price or auction ), acceptable payment methods ( crypt, fiat ), trading time ( hour, day or week ) and add a description of the lot. Next, the lot should pass the ( market compliance check ) moderation, and only after that it is listed, after which anyone can buy it and add it to their wallet.

Here is a step-by-step instruction for creating such an NFT market for Solana.

Step 1: Define Your Niche

NFT Universal Market. All NFT platforms can be divided into two types: universal and niche ( specialized ). Universal marketers sell various types of NFTs: art, sports, collecting, video games, music and more. When you start your NFT marketplace, you can take this path and create a platform that trades in several types of NFT. This will increase the reach of the audience, but at the same time complicate the progress of the site, since you will need to directly compete with market leaders — OpenSea, Rarible and Mintable.

Niche NFT Platform. Another option — is the launch of a single niche trading platform like Valuables, which sells celebrity tweets. With this approach, you can create a personalized design and increase the effectiveness of your marketing strategy.

Here are some promising niches that you can orient your own NFT platform to:

Art. The most obvious option, as it is the most popular and developed NFT market. Many beginners and famous artists can use NFT to sell their digital paintings and / or copies of their original — paintings is simple, profitable and becoming more popular.
Video games. The second most popular NFT — is the sale of game characters and items. True, so far almost all such markets — is just an addition to the video games ( method of their monetization ). Today, there is not a single popular NFT marketplace that would trade NFTs from various gaming projects. You may be the first.
Real estate. This is the most exciting idea for developing an NFT market play, as it allows you to sell it as easily and quickly as digital copies of video games. Tokenization of such transactions will make them much cheaper, since blockchain will allow to remove many intermediaries.
Collection. NFTs can be used to present digital collectibles in the same way as conventional collections of physical cards ( sports, gaming, philately and more ). It may seem unpromising to you, since you can create as many digital cards as you like, but practice shows otherwise: on the NBA Top Shot platform in February 2021, the NFT LeBron slam dunk card was sold for $ 208,000. And this is far from the most expensive sports card.
Event tickets. Scalping, fake tickets, lack of standards, high cost of servicing — serious problems in the sports, music and theater business, and all of them can be solved using blockchain and NFT. More about this in the article:
Music. Musicians, like artists, can now token and publish their work in the form of non-replaceable tokens thanks to blockchain and smart contracts. This will expand the range of opportunities available to artists for monetization and profit from their music, as well as other content related to the music and image of the artist.
Science. In May 2021, the University of California at Berkeley announced that patents for two Nobel Prize medical technologies, — CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing and cancer immunotherapy — will be sold using NFT. Now such things are sold through auction houses, which is long and inconvenient, which creates the ability to launch the NFT platform.

Step 2: Select a Handler

When you decide on the target niche, the next step will be to search and hire a blockchain developer who can turn your business idea into a work and safe software product such as Merehead. Since 2015, our company has been providing extensive technological support for the NFT marketplace development of software solutions in the field of blockchain, cryptocurrency and NFT. And we will be happy to help you create your NFT market, regardless of the niche you have chosen.

Step 3: select the project monetization model

At the next step in creating the NFT platform, you must choose the model of its monetization — decide how you will make money. There are several such models.

Here is a brief description of the most common:

Commission monetization model. This is the most common model on all online markets, including NFT marketers. It involves charging a small commission ( from 1 to 15% ) from suppliers with each successful transaction completed via the NFT platform. In other words, the store administrator will make a profit by taking part of the sales revenue of users of the trading platform.
Subscription Monetization Model. If there is enough traffic on the trading platform, you can consider the subscription model, the fee for which will be charged once a month, six months or a year. This approach is not used so often, because for this your trading platform should have an important advantage over competitors, for example, access to very rare and popular NFTs that can only be bought on your site.
Freemium monetization models. This is an approach in which the platform offers both free and paid services. Usually this means that anyone can trade on the site, but free participants are limited in functionality, for example, they can only make 10 transactions a month, or their offer does not look so attractive, like paid cards.
Lid reward model. The most common monetization strategy for online market-based markets. In it, NFTs suppliers will pay a small amount for each visitor to their page in the store, as happens when paying for contextual advertising.
Listing pay model. Another popular monetization model involving the collection of a small amount or percentage of the cost of each NFT put up for sale on your marketplace. In this case, fees are charged regardless of whether the lot has been sold or not.

Step 4: Decide on Marketplace Functions

Showcase. This is the face of your NFT trading platform, which will attract users and push them to register and make purchases. Therefore, the showcase should be as attractive as possible and at the same time have the usual design so that any user can figure it out at first glance. In addition, NFTs placed on the site must contain all relevant information, starting from their price, owner and description, and ending with the preferred payment method.

Wallet Integration. These are special applications that allow users to manage their cryptocurrency assets, including NFTs. When developing your NFT marketplace, you need to integrate with such wallets, and there should be several of them so that users can choose the option suitable for them. Popular options — Metamask and Coinbase wallet. In addition, users also often use wallets such as AlphaWallet, Enjin, TrustWallet, PillarWallet, MathWallet and Binance Chain Wallet.

NFT Asset Checker / Create. Another important function that you must implement when developing your NFT marketplace development is to check the new NFTs. This should be as fast and easy as possible, as the NFT market attracts mostly unskilled users who are not familiar with blockchain, smart contracts and NFT. Ideally, this process should not be more complicated than posting ads on sites such as Craigslist, OLX or Amazon.

How the lot is created on OpenSea.

Smart Search Function. NFT sites should be able to record, store and display the entire history of users. This includes trading data and transaction history in addition to created, put up for sale and sold by NFTs. And, of course, along with this, there should be a search system on the site that will allow users to find information of interest to them.

Search filters. Developing an NFT trading platform with advanced filtering options will help users find the correct NFT of their choice in a short period of time. This will make your site more attractive to all users and increase the selling speed of NFTs.

Ratings and reviews. This is an optional function, but today without it in any way. Users are used to looking at the reaction of other people, and when they do not see it, they begin to search for it in other places. This creates the conditions for traffic leakage from the site, which is worth avoiding. In addition, it is useful to create a trusting atmosphere and prevent fraud on your trading platform.

Rating of the most popular NFT assets on OpenSea.

Auction system. In addition to selling NFT at a fixed price, you should also offer your users the opportunity to sell the lot by auction. This will be an additional advantage for users in determining the price of NFT. In addition, the auction makes trading more interesting.

Notifications. Based on user transactions and search history, the platform may be able to send warnings and notifications to users. For example, if a token of their beloved artist appears on the market or some incomprehensible activity occurs with their account.

NFT royalty. This feature can attract more users, as it allows NFT creators to make profits from each secondary sale.

Support. All NFT outlets must include a comprehensive customer support system through text chat, or real-time call, or a Knowledge Center to guarantee, that all user problems will be resolved and appropriate answers will be received to all their requests.

Step 5: Develop a Nice Interface

At the next stage of the NFT marketplace development company you should decide what its user interface will look like. It is optimal if it will simultaneously look like the design of other popular NFT platforms and at the same time stand out somehow.

NFT-marketplay interface technical stack:

Programming languages for web: Angular.JS, React.JS, and Vue.JS.
Programming languages for mobile: Java, Kotlin for Android, and Swift for iOS.
Architecture: MVVM for Android and MVC, MVP, MVVM, and VIPER for iOS.
IDE: Android Studio and Xcode for iOS.
SDK: Android SDK and iOS SDK.

Step 6: Develop Smart Contracts

The entire logic of the interaction of your NFT platform with the Solana blockchain will be configured in ( smart contracts in Solana they are called « programs » ). It is they who will be responsible for the NFT chasing and for their purchase and sale on your trading platform. To create smart contracts on the Solana network, the languages C, C + + and Rust are used.

Step 7: Develop a Server Part

In addition to smart contracts, your platform will also need a backend, which will be responsible for storing and processing large amounts of data outside the blockchain.

NFT-marketplaying technical glass:

Frameworks: Spring, Symfony, Flask.
Programming languages: Java, PHP, Python.
Databases SQL: MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, MS SQL, Oracle.
Databases NoSQL: MongoDB, Kassandra, DynamoDB.
Search engines: Apache Solr, Elasticsearch.
DevOps: GitLab CI, TeamCity, GoCD Jenkins, WS CodeBuild, Terraform.
Cache: Redis, Memcached.

Step 8: Test Your Product

This step helps developers identify and correct critical errors, security issues or failures. In addition, it is very important to check work correctness and security of smart contracts, since they are the main goal of hackers who want to steal money and NFTs of your users.

Step 9: Launch the NFT Marketplace

After completing the testing phase, it’s time to launch your NFT marketplace development on the cloud server. But do not relax, as this is not the last stage, after this step you must constantly maintain and update the software.