Does Your Project Need Its Own NFT Marketplace?

1 Million NFTs
4 min readSep 13, 2023

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Do you have an NFT project that’s launching soon? Choosing the right marketplace for your NFT can be a daunting experience, but not if you decide to build a custom community platform. With this approach, your marketplace can feature custom branding, offer relatively affordable gas fees, and assure the collector that they are buying from a genuine project.

To underscore the value of custom NFT marketplaces, let’s look at a hypothetical scenario involving Web 2.0 companies X and Y. Both have a new project, but X decides to launch sales on its own website while Y finds it worthwhile to partner with a third-party service provider like Amazon.

Company X will definitely create a superior, and more personalized shopping experience than Y as its sales platform will only feature one brand or product line. On the other hand, company Y buyers will be dealing with clutter and congested support lines, among other prevalent challenges of giant eCommerce platforms. Through this concept, custom NFT marketplaces enable projects to offer an unrivaled collection experience.

Reasons Why Your NFT Project Needs Its Own Marketplace

Ecosystem marketplaces are slowly gaining traction, with NFT projects like Mata Angles, Ape Academy, CryptoPunks VI, Degenerate, and Wanderers all having a custom sales platform. There are also household NFT names, such as CryptoKitties, that have been leveraging ecosystem marketplaces even before NFTs went mainstream.

Having a custom NFT marketplace for your project means:

A Potent Tool for Building Cohesive Communities

Since Web3 projects are about communities, having a custom NFT marketplace allows you to focus on your target audience by providing an additional platform for connection or engagement. A custom platform is a place where every community member will feel free to trade and navigate the underlying ecosystem. Moreover, this approach also allows you to support your DAO through trading fee contributions.

Better Platform Management and User Experience

With an own NFT marketplace, projects have direct control over gas fees, user interface, or even wallet integration. This allows them to manage the platform better and offer an end-to-end collection experience by optimizing costs, integrating an easy-to-use wallet, and designing a user-friendly interface.

A Consistent Brand Experience

As noted earlier, community NFT marketplaces facilitate custom branding, a strategy that can help boost the reputation or credibility of the underlying project. In other words, a consistent brand experience all the way from social media and discord servers to website and own marketplace assures the user that they are collecting original NFTs.

Why Custom NFT Marketplaces Are Not Popular

Surprisingly, custom NFT marketplaces are hard to come by in the industry, despite the endless benefits they provide to ecosystem projects. A majority of projects, including the coveted “blue chip” options, often partner with third-party marketplaces to power sales.

So, why can’t every NFT project create its custom NFT marketplace? Here are the barriers to entry:

Building a Function NFT Marketplace is an Uphill Task

As a Web3 paradigm, the NFT concept is meant to benefit all levels of users. For this reason, most NFT projects consist of small teams that can hardly meet the human and capital resources required to build a fully-fledged NFT marketplace. Besides coding the front and back ends, building an NFT marketplace also extends to writing smart contracts for digital assets.

In other words, it’s hard to justify the effort needed to build a custom marketplace, especially if the underlying project is small. Luckily, NFT projects can turn to decentralized open-source solutions that help accelerate marketplace development.

Mainstream Platforms Have Users’ Attention

NFTs penetrated the mainstream arena through secondary marketplaces, such as OpenSea. If you’re running an established project that’s in the consciousness of the public domain, getting users to switch from the default mainstream marketplaces to your custom platform can be easier said than done. Although custom marketplaces offer unparalleled experience, consumers are mainly concerned about liquidity and trading volumes.

Fortunately, you can solve this challenge by aggregating orders to increase listings. More listings will attract more buyers and create a virtuous market activity. That way, collectors will feel more convinced about your custom NFT marketplace and will likely switch.

Community Marketplaces Will Help Web3 Grow

While building custom NFT marketplaces can be challenging, it’s hard to ignore that community-based platforms have a greater potential to push the entire NFT industry further. For instance, these markets can enhance censorship resistance and drive the true future of decentralization. Having several custom NFT marketplaces means that projects will stop overlying on about 5 platforms that largely dictate what can and cannot be listed on their website.

At the same time, community NFT marketplaces will be quick to adopt innovation, unique features, and new mechanics to create an ideal user experience. A great user experience across the board means more mainstream adoption, which is a big win for the industry. Even better, this allows projects to power trades with native tokens, a trend that will culminate in successful, stand-alone shared economies in the near future.

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1 Million NFTs

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