How to create a marketplace like the Open Sea

The sale of physical art has reduced drastically and the pandemic added fuel to the fire. Token-based sales are growing by leaps and bounds and have achieved huge profits. The most trending word in today’s digital market is NFT. NFTs are non-fungible tokens with unique metadata. It refers to any piece of digital content linked to the blockchain. Apart from the unique metadata, NFTs are rare, indivisible, tradable, and cannot be printed or counterfeited, unlike other cryptographic coins. In the coming future, NFTs can be used as one untraceable asset which can digitize human beings’ individual attributes. Some popular examples of NFT can be a tweet, a game character, sports, digital artwork, etc. There are many marketplaces available to trade NFTs. Some popular NFT marketplaces are Rarible, Opensea, and Super Rare.

Process of creating NFT marketplace:

• A digital wallet needs to be chosen after signing up.
• After the selection of a digital wallet, the creation of NFTs or digital assets is done.
• The E-Commerce platform then displays the digital collectibles in the product listing section.
• The trading happens through an auction or a fixed price and the marketplace helps in executing the process.
• The final step includes the transfer of digital assets and money.

Open Sea overview:

Open Sea is one of the top NFT Marketplaces, meant for the trading of NFTs. It is decentralized in nature and is one of the biggest marketplaces for Digital goods on Ethereum Blockchain. One can trade assets freely, launch new digital works and help in creating an integrated marketplace for digital assets. First formed in 2018 by Alex Atallah and Devin Finzer, it is known to be the first decentralized NFT marketplace. Open Sea boasts of having all sorts of unique items like digital art, game items, digitized forms of physical assets, etc. 

Features:

• One e-commerce storefront.
• Proper search option.
• Product listing.
• Multiple filters.
• Buying functionalities.
• Sync with other digital wallets.
• Auction facility.
• Seamless payment gateways.
• Product rating option.
• Security.
• Transparency.
• Smart contacts.

Steps for opening and trading on open sea account:

• Analyzing the business model and selecting target users are the prime steps. The target should be one simple and effective model.
• In the case of mobile apps for building an NFT marketplace, one needs to choose between native mobile apps and hybrid ones. Native mobile apps are good in their performance and security but quite expensive because one has to maintain two different codebases. Hybrid ones are cheaper but the performance lags behind.
• Choice of a good cloud platform is mandatory. One can choose among  IaaS, PaaS, and MBaaS.
• To maintain a user-friendly interface, a good UI/UX design is very much needed. Non Fungible Token companies can help you with the matter. There are generally three types of users in the marketplace like buyers, creators, and administrators.
• ETH is very much needed to speed up transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. Coinbase can be of help in this regard. ETH helps in minting, purchasing, and obtaining gas fees to conduct the transaction on the Ethereum blockchain. Apart from Coinbase, there are Zabo APIs as well.
• The next big step is to have a crypto wallet like MetaMask. Crypto wallet helps in storing the ETH and make transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. Etherscan keeps the record of all transactions connected to the wallet. 
• Software testing cannot be skipped to ensure security and reliability. For security solutions firewalls, multi-factor authentication (MFA), digital signatures, secure cloud infrastructure can also be implemented. The testing tools vary according to the medium; Selenium for web apps, XCTest for iOS apps, and Espresso for Android apps.
• Before the actual coding, prototyping the UIs and screen mockups stands essential. The coding of the app must rely on client satisfaction.
• The successful creation of a crypto wallet will finally lead to the Open sea marketplace.  It is to be noted that Open Sea does not store the assets but only trades NFTs.

Marketplace Cost Accumulation:

The functionality or non-functional requirements of the platform decide the cost. More complex designs will require more money whereas simple ones will be cheaper. There are more factors like user flow, quality aspects, etc which are responsible for the high or low costing. The average timing needed to create the marketplace is approximately 1063 hours and costing varies from $ 16,000 to $ 58,000.

It’s quite challenging for a non-technical person to develop the NFT marketplace. The Open sea is helpful to the seasoned but demands full dependency from a newbie. Plus it charges 2.5% on all the transactions which are unavoidable but with the help from NFT development companies, one can create the marketplace from scratch. Companies offer management support with full-time developers and eradicate the risk to a larger extent along with putting away the risk of cybercriminals.