With the growing popularity of NFTs, more people are looking for ways to trade these digital assets for some money. After minting an NFT or a collection of NFTs, how do you show them to the world and possibly trade them for their value? This is why NFT marketplaces exist.

Since NFTs exist on the blockchain, it makes sense to also develop the NFT marketplace on the blockchain. Solana is great for building marketplaces because of its speed and cost-effectiveness. Solana can process 50,000 transactions per second (TPS) at peak load, making it arguably the fastest blockchain in operation today. It also imposes transaction fees of $0.00025 per transaction, which is great compared to other traditional blockchain networks and most preferred for building games and dApps that require high-volume transactions.

In this guide, we'll learn how we can create our own marketplace using the Mirror World Smart SDK.

What Is An NFT Marketplace?

Just like any other online marketplace for digital assets, NFT marketplaces allow you to store and sell NFTs. It's that simple. In an NFT marketplace, the NFTs are usually available for purchase or auction at a set price determined by the NFT creator. Some popular NFT marketplaces include Hyperspace, MagicEden, SolSea, OpenSea, etc.

However, the traditional NFT Marketplace will make your users jump back and forth between different apps, making the whole transaction process longer and affecting the user experience. To solve this issue, Mirror World provides an In-game NFT store, where users do not need to jump out of the dApp, the whole trading process can be completed directly in the dApp, which greatly optimizes the user experience and helps you achieve growth of trading volume.

How To Create A Marketplace

To create a marketplace on Solana, you'll need:

• A Solana Wallet
• NFTs or a collection of NFTs

Luckily for us, Mirror World provides all the necessary tools to make this a quick and easy process. Let's look at all the steps that'll help us create our own marketplace.

💡 Tip: Mirror World provides a demo collection for you to test your marketplace on Devnet. When you deploy your marketplace on Mainnet, make sure you involve a collection in your marketplace configuration file.

Step 1: Set up a Developer Account

If you do not already have a developer account, please head over to https://app.mirrorworld.fun/auth/login to get started. A developer account grants you access to all the features needed to build with the Mirror World Smart SDK and it can be created within seconds. If you run into any issues creating an account, Mirror World has active communities on Telegram and Discord with people on the Mirror World team ready to help.

Step 2: Fund your Wallet

Creating your marketplace on Solana will require around 0.01-0.02 SOL. Before creating on Mainnet, make sure you have enough funds in your developer account (the one you registered on the dashboard). Check How to buy cryptocurrency

If you are testing on Devnet, you can click “Airdrop Test Token” or go to solfaucet.com to get test SOL to your account.

Step 3: Create a collection and mint NFTs

Collections are a way to group your NFTs. Think of them as folders for your digital assets. You'll need a collection with NFT before you can create a marketplace on the developer dashboard. Check details here.

Step 4: Setting up your Marketplace

Now that we've already got a collection with NFTs, we can now go ahead and create a marketplace for our digital assets. Mirror World allows you to create your own marketplace using an open-source storefront template. Click on the "Marketplace" to get started.

💡 Tips:

1. Once the payment token is confirmed, you are not allowed to modify it after submission.
2. If you are building a marketplace on Devnet, we provide a demo collection to help you play around with it. If you are building a marketplace on Mainnet, make sure you involve a collection before you deploy the marketplace frontend (you will need a collection with at least one NFT to display).

If everything goes well, you should see a popup confirming the creation of your marketplace:

Congratulations! You have successfully created a marketplace of your own. The next step would be to create a storefront which will serve as a user interface for users to buy and sell NFTs on your marketplace. Read this comprehensive guide to learn how to deploy a marketplace storefront quickly and easily.

Step 5: Manage your marketplace

1. Manage your marketplace information You are allowed to change the information of your marketplace. Click the edit button and you can modify your marketplace name, logo and service fee. Around 0.00001 SOL will be charged as a gas fee.
2. Manage your collection You are allowed to change the collections that are displayed on your marketplace. Click “Manage collection” and make changes.

💡 Notice: Once confirmed, please update the downloaded configuration file on your storefront GitHub.

Let's Recap

At the end of this guide, you should have successfully created an NFT marketplace of your own. Let's summarize all the steps necessary to achieve this:

1. Set up a Mirror World developer account in order to use all the best features of the Mirror World Smart SDK.
2. Fund your Wallet. A small token will be required to create your marketplace. You can airdrop SOL into your wallet on solfaucet.com
3. Create a collection for your NFTs on Mirror World.
4. Set up your Marketplace and deploy your storefront.