Taking Steps To Become The Leading Marketplace For Bitcoin NFTs

  • January 14, 2022
Nick
Nick

Today, we’re announcing our biggest marketplace upgrade yet. We’re making it easier for users to find, buy, and trade their favorite NFTs and making it practical for Creators to deploy fully-fledged smart contracts for any collection without the need for scripting.

The inspiration for our platform was simple: the community was searching for a place to visually display all of their NFTs, regardless of where they came from. It was from this idea that our open marketplace spawned.

We now have our sights set on an even more ambitious goal: we aim to be the leading marketplace for Creators and digital art Collectors to find, list, and sell Bitcoin NFTs.

In this post, we’ll review the core marketplace upgrades we’ve made to work towards this goal as well as some key initiatives we’re taking to keep our momentum.


Core Marketplace

The core marketplace is the main focus of our improvements. We’ve spent the past few months carefully collecting user feedback, monitoring website patterns, and performing user experience testing. The result is a completely redesigned marketplace, purpose-built to foster a seamless user experience from start to finish.

STXNFT-design STXNFT-Redesign

What’s New with the Marketplace

Our high-performance marketplace features a clean and sleek new look, thanks to our friends and partners at Fungible Systems. The new design evolves from the previous, keeping true to its minimalism while dramatically improving site speed, functionality, and overall performance.

Beyond visual improvements, our marketplace is now enriched with more on-chain data. Transaction histories are recorded on the individual NFT level, providing users with more micro metrics that help them make informed buying decisions.

STXNFT-Megapont STXNFT-Megapont-collection-page

Perhaps the most anticipated new feature is a vastly expanded sort and filter menu. You can now make granular searches for the perfect NFT by layering on multiple filter options from price, to rarity, to individual attributes. What’s more, our all-in-one search bar is now present throughout the marketplace and can be used to quickly find and navigate to collections and user profiles.

STXNFT-Attributes

The Fungible Systems team brings extensive full stack development experience from projects inside and outside of the Stacks ecosystem. Most notably, the duo is responsible for bringing to life the original Hiro Wallet. Our marketplace shares some familiar design qualities with the Hiro Wallet, but aimed specifically towards a marketplace’s dynamic requirements.

Importantly, our partnership extends far beyond design alone. The Core Marketplace sits atop a completely rebuilt backend, a robust new API, and a thoughtfully executed user experience designed for scale. We’ll continue to work alongside Fungible Systems over the coming months as we deliver on our upcoming roadmap. We’re hopeful you’ll love these improvements as much as we do.


Creators Self Service Portal

Creators are the heartbeat of our ecosystem, bringing creativity, excitement, and innovation to the community. Creators not only deliver projects, but also foster the community and provide a home for new users to settle into and feel welcomed. Today, we’re announcing new tools for creators to focus on what they do best, so they don’t need to worry about the technical aspects of bringing a Bitcoin NFT project to life.

What’s New for Creators

The Creators Self Service Portal is the first fully-fledged collection deployment tool for collections of any kind. With our platform, Creators can deploy a production-ready smart contract to Stacks mainnet, secured by Bitcoin, in a matter of minutes.

The Creator who deploys the smart contract can choose what to do with their contract, allowing them to host their own website, minting page, or collection-specific marketplace in whatever way they see fit. Following deployment, our team will also be notified of the contract’s deployment and the user can request a minting page directly on stxnft.com. Following approval, a self service deployed collection can have their community mint or trade their NFTs right on our platform, too.

Due to extremely high Creator demand, we have opened our Self Service Portal first to our existing queue of artist submissions via private beta. In the coming weeks, we’ll open our platform to the public, allowing anyone to launch a secure and stress-tested smart contract for their custom collection.

Additionally, we’ve recently announced our partnership with The Mintery NFT Collective, providing Creators with the funding and support needed to create a great NFT collection. If you’re a Creator with a highly-specialized collection or even if you’d just like more hands-on assistance from mentors and technical resources in the ecosystem, we invite you to apply.


What’s Next

While we’re sure to have plenty of surprises in store, we think it’s time to reveal several core items on our roadmap over the coming months that we believe will help us become the leading marketplace for Bitcoin NFTs.

Improved User Profiles

Given our humble beginnings as a visual NFT wallet, it’s only fitting that we focus on improvements to the design and function of our user profiles. Collectors are the reason the Bitcoin NFT ecosystem can operate. They provide Creators with the support and resources to continue doing what they do best, and they support one another with community ties that keep marketplaces liquid.

And it’s not just about monetary support; Collectors showcase their own styles with the NFTs they collect and back Creators that align with their interests and ideals. We have a series of changes coming to User Profiles to give users a home to showcase their NFTs in their own unique style and format.

Auctions and More

Our core marketplace focuses first on fixed price NFT sales (in other words, buy it now). There are clear benefits to launching with this format: sellers have a clear intention to part with their NFT and they can name an exact price they’re willing to accept, while buyers can be sure their transaction will be accepted and they’ll soon be the new owner of their collectible. But we know that auctions provide clear benefits, too: sellers don’t always know the extrinsic value of their NFT, and buyers want the option to bid on an ultra-rare NFT in hopes that it might be accepted.

Auctions and their related functions open the door for greater flexibility. We’re actively building a set of features surrounding auctions, private sales, bundles of items, and more. We can’t wait to bring them to market.

Native Bitcoin Payments

In order to become the leading marketplace for Bitcoin NFTs, one thing must be true: users need a simple and effective way to buy and sell NFTs using native Bitcoin transactions. Stacks remains an essential aspect of Bitcoin-based interactions, but we can allow Stacks to do what it does best: serve as the invisible gas token to perform smart contract interactions, while allowing Bitcoin to be the primary method of payment.

This task is easier said than done, but we’re committed to bringing this functionality to our marketplace as soon as we’re sure it will be a seamless experience for all users.

Just last week, we launched the first collection to support minting with Bitcoin Lightning through our partnership with LNSwap.org. While we think this is a necessary first step, we are working to improve the experience even further and plan to eventually support native BTC payments for minting and secondary sales.

We’re confident that changes like these will open the door to a completely new set of users who are familiar with Bitcoin and trust its proven decentralization and security, a win-win for our community.


Closing Thoughts

We’re dedicated to our incredible Bitcoin NFT community and loyal user base. While we’re still just a small core team, we’re growing quickly thanks to your support. If you would like to help us build on Bitcoin and become the leading marketplace for Bitcoin NFTs, contact us.


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