A Comprehensive Guide to NFT Marketplace Development on Polkadot

The NFT industry is booming, and almost every blockchain facilitates NFT marketplace development on its ecosystem. With these marketplaces existing on different blockchain networks, the need for cross-chain compatibility in NFTs becomes crucial. If NFTs are not interoperable, their value and trading are limited within one single marketplace only. Lack of interoperability between NFT marketplaces is one of the biggest reasons hampering the global adoption of NFTs. So, NFT traders look for a marketplace that can interact with all the NFT projects.

Taking note of such obligations, Polkadot provides users with a network protocol that supports sharing of arbitrary data, resources, and tokens. An NFT marketplace developed on Polkadot provides interoperability with various blockchain networks. It facilitates the minting of interoperable NFTs, allowing traders to trade tokenized versions of their assets on a global scale. Acknowledging the growing demand for cross-chain NFT marketplaces, let’s understand more about Polkadot and how to develop an NFT marketplace on Polkadot.

• What is an NFT Marketplace?
• What is Polkadot?
• Why consider NFT Marketplace Development on Polkadot?
• How to Develop NFT marketplace on Polkadot?
• End line- Develop your NFT Marketplace on Polkadot with LeewayHertz

What is an NFT Marketplace?

NFT Marketplace is a decentralized virtual marketplace where NFT buyers and sellers can come together to mint, buy, sell, and trade NFTs. Over these marketplaces, both the digital assets and tokenized versions of real-world assets are accessible. People can use credit/debit cards and cryptocurrencies to buy and sell NFTs on the marketplaces. In addition to trading NFTs, these decentralized marketplaces offer auctions for the NFTs, allowing the highest bidder to buy the NFT of his choice.

NFT creators are often the digital content creators, artists, social media influencers, luxury brands, game collectors, gamers, and even popular celebrities who use NFTs as their branding tool. These marketplaces provide NFT creators with a great means to monetize their work. For audiences, it offers them a platform to interact with their favorite artists and provides them ownership for their desired NFTs. Since NFTs offer immutable proof-of-ownership, NFT buyers can prove their NFT ownership even when those NFTs are traded in the secondary market. Even when the ownership changes hand, NFTs continue to benefit the original owner by providing royalties. With such benefits, NFT marketplaces have been gaining worldwide traction.

What is Polkadot Network?

Polkadot is a fully decentralized blockchain that enables true interoperability across different Parachains and external chains linked through bridges. Connecting to the Polkadot network, users can build solutions that can easily interoperate with various blockchains to leverage cross-blockchain transfer and sharing of all kinds of data and not just tokens. A Swiss organization, Web3 Foundation, funds the Polkadot project with the vision of building a decentralized and open-source web that is not controlled by any central authority.

Polkadot allows developers to build Parachains with the substrate network. The Parachains built over the Polkadot Relay chain are naturally interoperable with each other. This way, the Polkadot network helps the Parachains to communicate seamlessly with each other whether they are permissioned, permissionless, or consortium in nature. NFT marketplaces build on a Polkadot Parachain are cross-chain compatible, and the same is not possible in most first-generation blockchains. Interoperability enhances their NFTs, enabling their trading on diverse marketplaces.

Polkadot aims to free developers from relying on a broken web where involved institutions can take advantage of their privileges and violate the trust by allowing people to build innovative solutions. Discover more about Polkadot from this insight.

Why consider NFT Marketplace Development on Polkadot?

Blockchain, at its core, is decentralized, but it inherently cannot interact with a blockchain that exists on a separate chain. In the same way, NFT marketplaces built on an isolated blockchain ecosystem cannot allow its NFT traders to visit or explore the NFTs on a different blockchain-based NFT marketplace. To address these interoperability challenges, Polkadot offers a complete decentralized web where anyone can launch truly interoperable NFT marketplaces with no need for intermediaries that can access the users’ data or interrupt communication between blockchains. Following are the unique attributes of Polkadot:

True Interoperability

On Polkadot, users can perform cross-chain transfer and transfer any data, resources, not only the tokens. Polkadot allows interaction across the various Parachains interconnected to. in the Polkadot network

Economic Scalability

Polkadot offers unprecedented economic scalability as it appoints a common set of validators to validate and secure multiple blockchains. By spreading transactions across these parallel blockchains, Polkadot provides transactional scalability.

Easy blockchain Innovation

Polkadot allows people to create custom blockchain solutions, NFT marketplaces, and other blockchain-based use cases in minutes with its Substrate framework. All you have to do is connect your chain to the network and enjoy interoperability and security from day one. Such ease of development helps Polkadot to grow constantly.

Forkless and easy adaptable

The Polkadot network can enact upgrades without requiring hard forks to fix bugs or integrate features. Due to this capability, this protocol can adapt to changes easily and upgrade itself as a more advanced blockchain ecosystem.

High-security benefit

Polkadot’s unique data validity scheme and data availability enable the interaction of chains in a meaningful way. Hence, the chains remain independent but are united in terms of security.

User-driven network governance

Polkadot offers a sophisticated governance system that takes inputs from all the stakeholders. Upgrades on the Polkadot network are coordinated on-chain and done autonomously.

How to Develop NFT Marketplace on Polkadot?

Under this section, we will walk through the step-by-step process of developing and launching an NFT marketplace on the Polkadot blockchain. For this, you first need to install the sample marketplace locally, either on a computer or on a virtual machine with Ubuntu OS. In addition, you need to set up the infrastructure (like domain name, firewall, hosting, Nginx, and SSL certificate) that allows users to access the server hosting the Marketplace. Let’s proceed to the marketplace development.

Prerequisites:

• OS: Ubuntu 18.04 or 20.4
• docker CE 20.10 or up
• git
• docker-compose 1.25 or up
• Google Chrome Browser

Step1- Install Polkadot (.js) Extension

Visit https://polkadot.js.org/extension/ and click on the ‘download for chrome’ option. Chrome will provide you with the rest of the self-explanatory steps.

Step2- Create admin address

Next, click on the icon representing Polkadot{.js} extension and select ‘create a new account’ from the menu. You are required to write down a 12-word mnemonic seed. Avoid sharing this phrase with anybody since that’s all someone needs to access your NFTs stored on the Marketplace and the deposited money. Follow further instructions on Polkadot{.js} to complete the account setup.

Step 3- Get DOT

To regulate the Marketplace, you will need some Polkadot’s native coin, DOT. However, it is free to run the Marketplace on the TestNet 2.0. To get your coins, go to Polkadot (.js) extension and then copy your account address to send it to the faucet bot.

Step4- Deploy the smart contract for the Marketplace. Follow the given steps:

1. At first, download matcher. Wasm and metadata.json files.
2. Next, open Polkadot Apps UI over the Contracts page.
3. Click on the ‘Upload & deploy’ code button and select the matcher. Wasm and metadata.json files you have previously downloaded. Once selected the files, click “Next.”
4. Contribute 300 coins to the contract as it requires coins to store the data.
5. Once your transaction is done successfully, you will see a green notification on the top right corner. Plus, the contract will then appear in the ‘contact’ list.
6. Expand the messages section and search for the ‘SetAdmin’ method.
7. Now, click on the “exec’ button given in front of the setadmin. Next, select the marketplace address as the caller (call from the account) and as a parameter (message to send). Make sure to put the same address twice, click the execute button, and follow the rest of the signing transaction.
8. Click on the matcher contract ornament and copy its address for further use.

And here, your matcher contract is all set to go.

Step5- Go to GitHub and clone the marketplace code

Open the terminal and run the following command:

git clone https://github.com/[samplemarketplace]/marketplace-docker  
cd marketplace-docker
git checkout feature/easy_start
git submodule update --init --recursive --remote

Step6- Configure backend (.env file)

Configure the marketplace backend using your administrator address, seed, and the matcher contract address. Follow the given steps:

1. Create a .env file in the marketplace docker project. Paste the following code in there:

POSTGRES_DB=marketplace_db
POSTGRES_USER=marketplace
POSTGRES_PASSWORD=12345
ADMIN_SEED=
MATCHER_CONTRACT_ADDRESS=
[SAMPLE MARKETPLACE]_WS_ENDPOINT=wss://[testurl]
COMMISSION=10
DISABLE_SECURITY=true

2. Edit .env file: Convert ADMIN-SEED to the 12-word admin mnemonic seed phrase that you earlier saved when creating the admin address in the Polkadot (.js) extension.

3. Convert the value of MATCHER_CONTRACT_ADDRESS to the Matcher contract address that you previously copied from Apps UI after its deployment.

4. The rest of the values will remain intact.

Step7- Configure frontend(.env file)

Now, we will configure the front end of the Marketplace with your matcher contract address and your administrator. Specify the collected you want on the Marketplace and determine the domain name hosted on the localhost (to present an example).

1.Create an empty .env file with the UI/apps/packages and copy the given code in there:

CAN_ADD_COLLECTIONS=false
CAN_CREATE_COLLECTION=false
CAN_CREATE_TOKEN=false
CAN_EDIT_COLLECTION=false
CAN_EDIT_TOKEN=false
COMMISSION=10
CONTRACT_ADDRESS=''
DECIMALS=6
ESCROW_ADDRESS=''
FAVICON_PATH='favicons/marketplace'
KUSAMA_DECIMALS=12
MAX_GAS=1000000000000
MIN_PRICE=0.000001
MIN_TED_COLLECTION=1
QUOTE_ID=2
SHOW_MARKET_ACTIONS=true
VALUE=0
VAULT_ADDRESS=""
WALLET_MODE=false
WHITE_LABEL_URL='http://localhost'
[SAMPLE MARKETPLACE]_COLLECTION_IDS=23,25
[SAMPLE MARKETPLACE]_API='http://localhost:5000'
[SAMPLE MARKETPLACE]_SUBSTRATE_API='wss://testnet2.[testurl]'

Step 8- Build and Run

You can pre-pull the docker images before starting.

docker pull postgres:13.4
docker pull node:latest
docker pull ubuntu:18.04

Execute the below command in the terminal and wait for it to finish:

docker-compose -f docker-compose-local.yml up -d --build

Step 9- Done!

Open localhost in your Chrome browser. With the first launch, you will see the request from Polkadot{.js} ‘s request for authorizing the website. Click ‘yes.’ Your Marketplace will now connect to the blockchain ecosystem, displaying the blank Marketplace page. It’s now ready to go.

Endline- Develop your NFT Marketplace on Polkadot With LeewayHertz

At LeewayHertz, we are a team of blockchain-enthusiast developers engaged in designing and developing robust and innovative blockchain solutions. If you want to launch your own NFT marketplace on Polkadot, we offer you end-to-end development services, starting from Parachain development to the full-stack NFT marketplace development. Our team is versed with the Polkadot ecosystem, including the native programming languages, SDKs, tools, and frameworks.

If you are interested in launching your Polkadot- based decentralized NFT marketplace, please connect with our Polkadot blockchain developers.