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.

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.

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

After creating your developer account, a wallet will be automatically created for you. You need to fund this wallet in order to successfully create a marketplace, because mutating the state of the blockchain requires the signer to pay a small gas fee. Take the following steps to successfully fund your wallet:

1. Copy your wallet address. You can find and copy your wallet address on the navigation bar of the dashboard.
2. Go to solfaucet.com and airdrop 2 SOL on Devnet

Step 3: Create a collection

Collections are a way to group your NFTs. Think of them as folders for your digital assets. You'll need a collection before you can create a marketplace on the developer dashboard. To create a collection, sign in to your developer dashboard and click on the "NFT Collections" tab displayed on the sidebar underneath "Projects".

Click on the "Create Collection" button to create a new collection. You'll be redirected to a page asking you for more information about your collection. Please make sure to fill in every field with the appropriate information. After creating a collection, you should be redirected to the collections page and see your collection added to the collections list for your project.

Step 4: Minting NFTs to the collection

Adding NFTs that will be displayed on our marketplace is one of the most vital parts of our process. You can either mint NFTs directly from the dashboard, or follow this guide to learn how to mint NFTs using the Mirror World Smart SDK.

Step 5: Setting up your Marketplace

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

You should see a page that shares some important information about creating marketplaces on Mirror World.

You can create a new Marketplace at the click of the button on your developer dashboard. Click on the "Create Marketplace" button at the top right to create a new marketplace. You'll be required to fill out a form with the following fields:

Name: This is the name of the marketplace. You may pick a name similar to the name of your NFT collection Logo: Upload a marketplace logo to give some identity to your brand. Service Fee: Set your service fee that will be deducted after each successful NFT transaction. Mirror World charges 3% of the service fee as SDK commission fee, so keep this in mind when setting a service fee for your marketplace. Currency Option: This is simply the currency you'd like to sell your NFTs in. Please note that this value cannot be changed once it's confirmed.

Fill in the necessary details required, add a collection to the marketplace and click the "Create" button.

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.

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.