If you’re looking to launch a Non-Fungible Token marketplace, then this guide is for you — whether you’re building a marketplace from scratch or wanting to add NFT functionality to an existing marketplace, the steps I outline below are crucial in helping you successfully get your platform live.
We have created a Launch Kit to help you navigate the launch process. The OpenSea Token Launch Kit will walk you through the entire token launch process, from setting up your smart contracts to launching your marketplace.
Preparing to launch
You’ve come a long way in developing the perfect experience for your Non-Fungible Token marketplace. You launched your first test and have been making improvements via user feedback, trial-and-error, and maybe even some new hires. Now you’re preparing to launch your non-fungible token marketplace to the public, but before you do there are a few things that need to be considered…
There are a lot of things you need to do before you launch your NFT marketplace. Whether you’re selling NFTs, ERC-721 non-fungible tokens (NFTs), or ERC-1155 cryptocurrency products, OpenSea’s Launch Kit is made to assist you in getting your new ethereum Dapp ready for launch.
Define Your Core Values
Your company’s culture is cultivated and driven by your team’s core values. If you’re setting up a new company or creating a new project, you’ll want to take the time to develop some core values as well.
Core values keep everyone on the team aligned and allow your team to measure success in terms of product delivery both internally, and for any clients you have.
Pick a Target Customer
When I was first building OpenSea, I wasn’t sure what my target audience would be. I knew that we would support NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens), I thought they might be interesting to people working with game development, but beyond that I didn’t have any clue who might be interested in our product.
Choose Your Domain Name
So, you’ve built your NFT-powered marketplace. You have a team of smart contract developers and have them building the next big thing. But you don’t have any fans, any hype. Where would you promote your product? Somewhere in an obscure place full with unknown people? Or how about the best online marketing channel—the interwebs? Luckily, OpenSea has launched a new product that totally fits you—the Launch Kit. It is designed for each person who launches an Ethereum DApp powered by OpenSea.
Select Your Color Palette
Select your color palette. After you’ve completed the first step of choosing your favorite colors and color pairings, it’s time to get started creating! Feel free to follow your heart or go with my suggestions. Away we go!
Generate Assets and Logos
Three months later, people are building new games on top of the Crypto Kitties framework and a whole ecosystem has popped up around it, but there are new issues than the non-fungible token marketplace has to solve.
Launching your marketplace’s smart contract
OpenSea recently released their Launch Kit on GitHub, which contains a step-by-step guide for developers to create their first non-fungible token marketplace. Since reliability and security are core to OpenSea’s mission, this manual was created to ensure that developers can both follow best practices and protect the users of their marketplaces.
Step 1: Create a Github Repository
PREPARATION: Before you begin, you need to create a GitHub repository. This will be the location where you will be creating the source code of your marketplace, and if your code is open source. It will be available on GitHub to view. When you think about which tokens you wish to accept on your auction site, it is important that users are able to send these tokens easily. This can only happen if you set up a wallet address on the platform to receive these ERC-721 tokens.
Step 2: Create an OpenSea Developer Account and Note Your Keys.
The OpenSea team has launched the official OpenSea Launch Kit product. It is an extension of the OpenSea Developer account, providing basic functionality for launching a new marketplace on OpenSea that’s ready to accept affiliate payments from day one.
The kit comes with a suite of pre-built smart contracts, and will run any auction of NFTs for you — all for free and for every type of asset on the Ethereum blockchain (ERC-20 standard).
Step 3: Fill out your marketplace-starter repo with the correct keys.
It’s not a complex process, but launching your own NFT market can be a little overwhelming. There are a bunch of important details that need to be considered which is why I’ve created this guide. There are so many moving pieces and so much to think about! In response to this, the OpenSea team created a toolkit that helps you get from zero to deployed marketplace quickly and easily with fewer errors and support from our team.
Step 4: Purchase a domain name and link it to a Cloudflare account
When launching a new website, there is more to it than just creating a cool new landing page and announcing its existence to the world. One of the major steps in making your website successful is having your own domain name and hosting for it. You will need tools, notably one that is powered by OpenSea, to enable you launch your new non-fungible token marketplace, which is more significant.
Step 5: Change DNS record to point to IP address of your deployed marketplace-starter repo
Have a project on the Ethereum blockchain that needs an easy way to manage ERC721 non-fungible tokens? You’re in luck, because OpenSea’s new Marketplace-Starter — powered by Truffle — does just that. Here’s how to launch your Non-Fungible Token Marketplace with OpenSea’s Marketplace-Starter, and we’ll show you how it works.
Step 6: Fork the open-sea-assets repo and create your first asset!
Open Sea’s launch kit is a node.js application that you can spike on your local machine for testing purposes. By using our launch kit, you can create an ERC-721 marketplace from scratch using our open-source smart contracts and UI components.
With the growth of open source and protocol tokens (ERC-721, ERC-20), token creators need a place to publish their tokens. Token creators also need an easy place to launch these tokens, which is often times non-trivial. Processes vary from project to project, but the general steps are similar:
Launching your user interface
OpenSea’s Kit includes an example Chrome extension and hosted UI, as well as a starter-static node application and demonstration contract.
Today, OpenSea is excited to be releasing our newest and most comprehensive product yet. We provide developers with all the tools they require to launch their own marketplace on the OpenSea platform.
Takeaway: We want to make it as easy as possible to launch your marketplace, so try our Launch Kit today!
I hope you enjoyed this walkthrough, and that you’re eager to get started on your own marketplace. You can launch your marketplace in minutes by using our launch kit, or schedule a call with OpenSea’s team to learn more about launching a marketplace or advice tokenization best practices. We look forward to seeing the types of NFTs you bring to market!
The token economy is still in its infancy, with billions of dollars of value locked up in ERC20 tokens waiting to be spent. As these markets scale and grow, we think you’ll see an increase in the number of non-fungible token (NFT) marketplaces. We’ve created a Launch Kit to help you get your NFT marketplace off the ground quickly and easily!
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