Develop NFT Marketplace on Cardano Blockchain 

As the digital world is evolving, it is unfolding various innovative new-age revenue opportunities that entrepreneurs and businesses are apprehending. One such new lucrative business model is the NFT marketplace. The idea of building an NFT marketplace is appealing to many blockchain-enthusiast businesses and entrepreneurs, for they have witnessed the traders’ obsession over NFTs. Images, trading cards, video clips, digital artworks, domain names, and any physical assets (tangible or intangible)that has the potential to convert themselves into digital asset can be represented by an NFT token and then can be traded in NFT marketplaces.

For its ability to verify ownership of digital assets through immutable records on the Blockchain, NFTs have received worldwide acknowledgment as a new trading entity. They are the latest elements of a craze in the global crypto market, especially among artists, collectors, luxury brands, and sports franchises. NFT values are volatile like cryptocurrencies, and usually, the values are driven by demand and popularity. An NFT can attract whopping values in millions, which is why they have attracted massive attention from traders in a short period.

However, we won’t discuss NFT today; rather, we will talk about its trading platform-i.e the NFT marketplace. If you wish to read about NFTs in detail, you can check our NFT specific insight here. NFT marketplaces are built on various Blockchain platforms like Binance, Solana, Cardano, Ethereum, TRON, etc. This article will focus on Cardano NFT marketplace development.

Cardano is a third-generation proof-of-stake blockchain platform that has been developed through evidence-based methods based on peer-reviewed research. It has been developed to resolve the pain points of scalability, interoperability, and sustainability in distributed systems. The immutability of the distributed ledger technology of Cardano blockchain safeguards the transaction details and eliminates the possibility of fake transactions and cyberattacks on NFT marketplaces.

• What is an NFT marketplace?
• What are the key features of an NFT marketplace?
• What is Cardano Blockchain?
• Why consider Cardano blockchain for NFT development?
• How to launch an NFT marketplace on Cardano? 
• Launch your NFT marketplace on Cardano with LeewayHertz

What is an NFT marketplace?

As the name implies, the NFT marketplace is the platform where NFT creators and investors engage in NFT buying, selling, and trading. Over NFT marketplaces, the most common NFT creators are digital artists, music artists, video creators, gamers, game producers, art galleries, luxury brands, and influencers. The interested investors are usually art collectors, gamers, and crypto-enthusiast traders.

NFT marketplaces are open, decentralized platforms for artists to monetize their artworks by directly reaching out to the audience without involving any intermediary. That is why more and more artists are inclined to use NFT marketplaces. Another prime reason why NFT marketplaces are preferred is that they provide the artists access to both primary and secondary markets. As you know, NFTs are immutable and verifiable proofs of ownership, so an artist or NFT creator can always prove his copyrights of an NFT. Even when the NFTs are traded in the secondary market and their ownership changes hand, the original NFT creator continues to receive royalties.

As the popularity of NFTs is surging, an increased number of investors and traders are using NFT marketplaces to buy, hold and then sell NFTs to earn profits via price appreciation. Specialized NFT marketplaces for audio-video assets, Arts, Games, and Real estate are emerging to provide specific audiences with more customized features for better user- experiences. Such specialized NFT marketplaces are not just for NFT trading, but they function as social platforms for creators and investors to bond over.

What are the key features of an NFT marketplace?

Cardano, Solana, Ethereum, Tezos, almost every blockchain protocol supports the development of the NFT marketplace. Although the specialty of an NFT marketplace is the output of the core features of its parent blockchain protocol, the frontend of every NFT marketplace is provided with certain must-have features, such as:

Storefront

The dashboard provides collective information of an NFT: its owners, preview or price history.

Advanced Token Search

Supports tagging and category management for advanced search functionalities

Filters

Facilitates easy navigation, enabling users to select items by payment method, category, listing status, and collection.

Creating Listings

Allows users to create and maintain the collection of its NFTs, along with token information such as name, tags, description.

Bidding Option

Users can bid for NFTs listed on the platform

Wallet Integration

Wallets are required for storing, sending, and receiving non-fungible tokens.

Ratings

Provides an idea of the trending or in-demand NFTs

Blockchain protocols specify their NFT standards and also provide developers tools. Developers choose the storage platforms and frontend frameworks as per the project requirement or priority.

What is Cardano Blockchain?

As mentioned above, different blockchain protocols allow the development of the NFT marketplace upon it. Today, we will talk about the Cardano blockchain and understand NFT marketplace development in the context of Cardano.

The makers of Cardano have positioned it as the third-generation Blockchain because it has been designed to resolve the pinpoints of scalability, interoperability, and sustainability in the first and second-gen blockchains. Cardano is also the first Blockchain developed through peer-reviewed research and evidence-based methods. Even its output efficiency is higher and better than Ethereum, as stated by industry experts.

Developers love to develop on Blockchain like Cardano for its five key characteristics:

• Its consensus mechanism and protocol, Proof-Of-Stake And Ouroboros, respectively, are energy efficient, provide a secured environment for transactions and deliver sustainable performance.

• Being developed using evidence-based methods, Cardano is suitable for developing high-stake applications and can act responsively to emerging requirements and innovations.

• Its unparalleled security opens up to whole new markets and opportunities.

• It has an incentive mechanism that rewards users for their contributions as developers, stake pool operators, or stake delegators.

• Unlike other blockchains, Cardano does not use exponential energy for increasing performance and adding blocks.

Why consider Cardano NFT marketplace development?

As discussed so far, Cardano blockchain exhibits the potential to attract a larger crypto-audience. In the context of NFT marketplace development also, Cardano offers significant benefits, as mentioned below, and has emerged as one of the most preferred blockchains for building NFT platforms.

• Increasing traffic in an NFT marketplace hampers the performance of the system. Without scalability, the Blockchain fails to handle the growing traffic. Cardano achieves high scalability by solving the issues related to transactions per second, network bandwidth, and data storage.

• Its proof-of-stake consensus mechanism ensures high transaction speed.

• It uses a technique called RINA to split the network into subnetworks, reducing each node’s bandwidth requirement.

• It uses techniques like pruning, compression, and partitioning to tackle the problem of data storage.

• Proof of stake consensus mechanism is pledged to provide a high-security environment as 51% of the stake is held by honest participation. New iteration and security analysts continue to strengthen the security of the protocol.

• Cardano ensures a strong tracking of ownership and maintains complete records regarding the origin or history of the Cardano NFTs.

• It features a well-designed revenue model and earns money in different ways.

• Being open-source and through incentivization, it attracts continuous protocol development support from the community, which boasts its sustainability.

• Interoperability is another key strength of Cardano. It allows multiple currencies to exist side by side and seamlessly move across multiple chains.

• It is a scalable and technology-flexible chain that relies on the facts, uses specialized smart contract platforms like Plutus and Marlowe, and delivers higher throughput in lower transaction costs.

A Cardano NFT marketplace is a non-custodial and safe solution for those looking to buy and sell their Cardano NFTs. If you are interested in knowing how to mint Cardano NFTs, then check this insight.

How to build an NFT marketplace on Cardano?

By launching your own NFT marketplace, you can offer worldwide creators and collectors the opportunity to access the primary and secondary markets for buying and selling their digital assets through NFTs. The platform facilitates direct trading between buyers and sellers without involving any intermediary.

Defining target niche

Before building an NFT marketplace, the first step is to define the target niche of the platform, like digital artists or audio-video content creators or game-enthusiasts, or collective users.

Setting up prerequisites for specific blockchains.

NFT marketplaces are developed on multiple blockchains. If you choose to develop your marketplace on Cardano, you first have to set up the ownership of the Cardano node; it is one of the prerequisites. Developers must have elemental knowledge of the Cardano-Command line interface necessary for building an NFT platform on Cardano.

Defining user roles

Before developing the UI of your NFT platform, defining the user roles is important for ensuring the best user experiences for both creators and traders.

UI design

The user interface of your marketplace plays a key role in defining the user experience. The UI should be designed considering the usage-convivence of both buyers and sellers. An NFT marketplace requires hosting multiple features, and displays live price updates. Thus a high-performance clean UI design is needed to ensure easy navigation and consistency throughout for the users. The UI design also needs to be scalable for accommodating the new features and functionalities in the future.

Smart contract development, auditing, and integration

The next step is to develop smart contracts to spell out the terms of sale between a buyer and seller and store the codes of the self-executing digital contract in the Cardano network. Over Cardano, you can develop smart contracts using three specific development languages- Marlowe, Plutus, and Haskel. Each language has specific properties. Thus depending on your requirement, you can choose any of the languages for your smart contract.

Wallet integration 

Over Cardano NFT marketplace, all the transactions are usually conducted through ADA, the native token of Cardano. It would help if you integrate the Nami Wallet for buyers and sellers to work with NFTs. However, to appeal to a wider client base, you may want to integrate multiple crypto wallets. The Wallet will not contain the NFT files; rather, it will just store the information of the NFT transactions. The information stored in the Wallet will point to the location of the owner’s files stored on the Blockchain. NFT storage solutions are needed to store the NFT files.

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. Just like any software, you can choose to improve the user interface of the marketplace through innovative features.

Client testing

To ensure the code’s correctness, run extensive property-based testing on multiple Cardano-specified test nets and then launch it on the mainnet for the mass audience to participate. Rigorously optimize the platform during client testing.

NFT storage solution

A robust NFT storage solution is needed for storing the off-chain NFT data. There are different decentralized storage solutions to choose from. IPFS is a popular one that helps creators and NFT marketplace owners store data in a decentralized way.

Endnote – Launch your NFT marketplace on Cardano with LeewayHertz

We are a team of blockchain-enthusiast developers, engaged in designing and developing high-potential innovative blockchain solutions, including NFT marketplaces. If you are looking to launch your own NFT Marketplace on the Cardano blockchain, we can help you with end-to-end development services. Our NFT marketplace development is comprehensive of Blockchain, storage solutions, NFT standards, and frontend frameworks.

If you are interested in launching your Cardano- based decentralized NFT marketplace to appeal to the worldwide NFT traders, then please connect with our Cardano blockchain experts.