Develop NFT marketplace on Cardano blockchain

LeewayHertz
Javarevisited
Published in
5 min readNov 12, 2021

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Evolving blockchain technology unfolds various revenue growth opportunities for businesses and entrepreneurs. These wide opportunities eventually result in the mass adoption of blockchain across major industries and higher diversity in blockchain use cases. One of the prevalent use cases of blockchain is NFTs.

A non-fungible token (NFT) brings excellent opportunities for crypto enthusiasts, investors, and artists. An NFT is a tokenized version of an asset representing and verifying ownership for any digital asset.

NFTs can include virtual art, digital signature, tweets, social media posts, and even physical assets that can be converted into digital content and tokenized through NFTs.
The overwhelming popularity of NFTs has made it a new trading entity in which luxury brands and celebrities have started investing. Since NFTs are a form of assets, they need a virtual marketplace, called an NFT marketplace, where people can buy and sell NFTs. Popular blockchain such as Ethereum, Solana, Binance, and Cardano offers an open blockchain ecosystem to develop the NFT marketplace. This article will explain how to develop the NFT marketplace on Cardano.

What is an NFT Marketplace?

NFT marketplace is a decentralized platform where NFT creators and investors come together to buy and sell NFTs. Most of these NFT creators are artists, music composers, game creators, brands, and influencers. In comparison, the investors are crypto traders, art collectors, and gamers. Powered by blockchain, NFT marketplaces are open and decentralized. It allows the artists to monetize their artwork by minting the NFTs to a tamper-proof public ledger.
Such lucrative features of the NFT marketplace continue to attract crypto enthusiasts. In addition, the NFT marketplace has gained popularity by providing users access to primary and secondary markets. It means that an NFT creator can prove his NFT ownership. Meanwhile, he receives royalties even when the ownership changes and that NFTs are traded in the secondary market.

What is Cardano Blockchain?

Cardano is a third-generation proof-of-stake blockchain platform that resolves the issues of first-generation blockchain- bitcoin, and second-generation blockchain, Ethereum. It achieves high scalability, sustainability, and interoperability to offer faster transactions and high confirmation time. With these abilities, Cardano holds the potential to attract crypto enthusiasts.
What are the benefits of developing NFT Marketplace on Cardano?

Cardano emerged as one of the most preferred blockchains despite being relatively new.

In the context of NFT marketplace development, it offers the following benefits:
• Increasing traffic on the NFT marketplace slows down the system performance, but Cardano archives high scalability by solving bandwidth and data storage issues.
• Cardano’s proof-of-stake consensus mechanism is energy efficient that offers high-speed transactions at feasible rates.
• Cardano reduces the bandwidth requirement of each node. It does this by splitting the main network into different subnetworks using a technique called RINA.
• The blockchain proficiently maintains the ownership records for the Cardano NFTs, including origin and history.
• Cardano uses techniques such as pruning, compression, and partitioning to eliminate data storage issues.
• Cardano ensures high security across the network by rewarding the takers more for staking to under-saturated pools. Thus, it avoids 51% attack. In addition, new literation and timely security analysis further enhance the security of the ecosystem.
• By achieving high scalability and technology-flexible attribute (it uses smart contract platforms like Plutus and Marlowe), Cardano delivers high throughput at minimal transaction cost.

How to Build an NFT Marketplace on Cardano?

Having your own Cardano NFT marketplace has many benefits. It allows you to provide digital creators and buyers with a highly scalable decentralized platform. Plus, an opportunity to leverage primary and secondary NFT markets. Follow the given steps to build your NFT marketplace on Cardano.
Define the target niche for the marketplace

The first step to building an NFT marketplace is to determine its target niche. You can choose a suitable niche from popular niches like digital artists, gaming enthusiasts, video-audio composers, or collective users.
Setup prerequisites

To develop your marketplace on the Cardano blockchain, you first need to set up a Cardano node to gain ownership. Apart from this prerequisite, developers must be aware of Cardano’s command-line interface and the languages Cardano supports for development.

Defining user roles

You need to define the user roles before developing the UI of your NFT marketplace. It helps you to provide the best user experience both for the NFT creators and NFT buyers.

UI Design

The UI interface of your NFT marketplace defines the user experience, so it should be designed according to the convenience of both buyers and sellers.

Smart contract creation, auditing, and integration

The next step is to create a smart contract that spells out the NFT marketplace rules to the buyers and sellers and store the smart contract code in the Cardano network. Cardano allows the development of smart contracts using three programming languages; Marlowe, Plutus, and Haskel. Each of these languages has unique properties. Hence, users can pick any of these programmings according to their requirements and create smart contracts.

Wallet integration

Like every other blockchain, Cardano has its native token (or currency) called ADA. Every Cardano user, whether buyer or seller, needs to integrate their Nami wallet to the platform to execute transactions. Moreover, users involved in international trades or handling overseas clients must integrate a multi-crypto wallet to accept payments in multiple tokens. Note that the wallet only contains details about transactions, not the NFT files. It further helps in verifying the identity both on the NFT buyer’s and seller’s end by pointing out the exact location of the file’s owner since it’s already stored in the blockchain

Features integration

Cardano NFT marketplace supports a range of features. While integrating the must-have market features like storefront, wallet integration, bidding options, search filters are necessary to make the marketplace functional, there is no capping on feature integration. Like any software, you can choose to improve the user interface of the marketplace through innovative features.

Client testing

To ensure the code is constructed correctly, you need to run property-based testing on Cardano’s multiple test nets. Once the testing is done, launch it to the mainnet to allow mass audience participation. Rigorously optimize the platform during client testing.

NFT storage solution

A robust NFT storage solution is required to store the off-chain NFT data. Although many NFT storage solutions are available, IPFS is the most used solution marketplace owners use to store data through decentralized technology.

Conclusion

NFT marketplaces are equally beneficial for digital creators, investors, and NFT marketplace owners. Marketplace owners generate revenue by charging listing and gas fees. Likewise, NFTs buyers and sellers raise profit through buying and selling NFTs. In a nutshell, the NFT marketplace offers enormous opportunities for users.

If you plan to leverage the benefits of the NFT marketplace and explore the NFT space, this is the right to execute your ideas since NFTs are booming. For this, you can develop your own NFT marketplace on Cardano or the blockchain you want. Alternatively, you can contact a professional NFT marketplace development company to get a top-notch NFT marketplace developed according to your precise demands.

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LeewayHertz
Javarevisited

AI development company enabling innovation and rapid development We build cutting edge software solutions for startup. https://www.leewayhertz.com