How Wildchain Built Their NFT Marketplace: from concept to mint
Check out Wildchain’s Adoption Center, and let’s dive into how it was created!
Welcome to the behind-the-scenes of the Adoption Center, our very own NFT marketplace. This is a platform where our community can get Wildlife NFTs and, by doing so, create a real-world environmental impact. Today, we’re unveiling the curtains. What was the concept and vision? Which obstacles did the development and design teams face? Let’s dive into it.
🔭 The Vision: how it all started
The marketplace was seeded as an idea by our Executive Director, Florian. He laid out the concept and vision for our NFT Marketplace.
We wanted our marketplace to be:
- a driver of positive change by enabling a community to utilize planet-positive NFTs.
- a powerful tool to create awareness and opportunities to create positive environmental impact.
- a facilitator of collaborations between gamers, artists, collectors, and organizations who share our mission to make the planet a greener place.
Building our NFT marketplace
After establishing the vision, we quickly concluded that we needed to build our platform from scratch instead of using existing templates. With our own marketplace, we would have full control over the design, user experience, and platform fees.
Ultimately, we envision our marketplace as a hub for climate-conscious individuals and organizations to collaborate and make a difference in the world — Florian Rehm, Executive Director at Wildchain
🎨 The Design: not all marketplaces are created equal
After the vision for our marketplace became clear, it was our design team’s turn to give it the look and feel of Wildchain.
Personalization
Many details went into creating the platform because we wanted to ensure it would stand out and align with Wildchain’s branding. For example, we transformed titles to be more on-brand. We went from ‘’NFT gallery’’ to ‘’My Herd’’, and our designer Eva also created many personalized icons and elements.
Every design decision was made to make the user feel part of our Virtual Conservationist Community. We also wanted the platform to be immediately recognizable as being part of Wildchain — Eva Sierra, UI & UX designer at Wildchain
Design challenges
Of course, designing an NFT marketplace comes with its challenges. Here are the main ones we encountered:
- Future-proofing: We needed to ensure that our platform had a strong foundation that could be expanded with more features in the future. However, this requires significant time researching other NFT marketplace designs and website functions.
- Striking a balance: Our marketplace and mobile game are linked (every wildlife NFT can be played in our mobile game) but can also be used separately. Therefore, we needed to find a way to design our marketplace to be unique and share the same design language as our mobile game.
- Dynamic NFTs: One utility of our NFTs is that they are dynamic, meaning the animal NFTs can grow from baby to adult over time. It was a real headscratcher to find a way to visually communicate that on our platform. We built-in an ‘’attributes’’ tab that displays all of the different characteristics of the NFT image, including the maturity of the wildlife NFT.
👨💻 The Development: coding it to life
After our designers finished the high-fidelity design in Figma, it was time for our developers to code and make it come to life.
Essential features
Important features for an NFT marketplace are the ability to connect a crypto wallet and ensure security is on point. Our developers needed to set up card components and backend APIs. Implementing such features from scratch was the most time-consuming task in setting up the foundation of our marketplace. However, it shouldn’t be rushed because ensuring the security and safety of our users’ crypto wallet details is essential.
Building challenges
Building an NFT marketplace came with some challenges & blockers. These are the main ones we encountered in the development phase:
- Wallet compatibility: This was difficult to integrate due to our multiple wallet options.
- Moving to the main net: Rebooting on the main net proved more difficult than on the test net, resulting in some production delays.
Finding the solutions to our development blockers and eventually seeing all the different components coming together felt very rewarding. I was very excited to see our marketplace in action for the first time during our community airdrop — Daniel Ekara, full-stack developer at Wildchain
✨ The Product: Adoption Center and the Genesis NFT collection
After all the hard work from everyone on the team, we were finally ready to launch our NFT Marketplace (Adoption Center) on April 22nd, 2023. On this day, we released our Genesis NFT Collection — Rewilding Savanna, available to adopt now. Check it out and let us know what you think!
We’d love for you to get involved and join the herd ⬇️
