how to build a successful NFT marketplace
At NFT Paris 2023, which took place in the French capital on 24-25 February, we interviewed Yawn Rong, co-founder at Find Satoshi Labs, creator of the most famous STEPN NFT project to talk about how a successful marketplace should work.
What are the plans for the future expansion of the game and the NFT market?
We started STEPN during Covid-19. I was so bored, in a lockdown there were many lockdowns in Australia. Jerry was my neighbor at the time, and we saw each other constantly at home, as we could not walk more than a 500 km radius.
We said to each other “let’s make a crypto project” because Jerry has a background in building games and I’m more involved in crypto investing, mining and everything to make profit in crypto.
So we merged our two companies and we wanted to develop a game. Originally the game didn’t involve walking, but it had to be something like Monopoly or SuperMario.
Then the lockdown continued, but we could walk for a couple of hours and the police checked. Never seen so many people walking around with kids or with their dogs, so I thought it would make sense to make something related to walking outside.
When you make a game, people demand updates, they get bored quickly, so we decided to remove a lot of gameplay parts, the narrative and we kept the core. It’s the story and people like it, we have 20,000 to 50,000 people using it every day.
What do you think about the NFT market right now? How can it grow in the future? What is your prognosis for adoption?
The barriers are still too high for a person to enter the NFT space for the first time. We are working on lowering the barriers to entry, this is our goal. That is what we want to solve.
What are your next goals and objectives for STEPN?
Last year we established the goals of expanding the Find Satoshi Labs ecosystem, which means that a single app must always be developed. We have to keep building and this is the most important goal also to support the GMT token.
So we decided to build our marketplace, DEX and we have another field ecosystem for infrastructure that is going to be released later this year.
Once we complete the ecosystem, we need to start populating it with retailers and products. STEPN will always be one of them, but we want to release more apps.
In that way, we develop this kind of “walk with two legs” strategy: with one leg we focus on NFT and the other leg works on tokenomics with the GMT token at the center.
NFT and token will support each other. For example token burn to mint NFTs, NFT to have tokens, etc…
How is the NFT marketplace Mooar and the DEX called Dooar doing?
Dooar is the DEX we are building. We tried to combine all necessary components in one app which is STEPN. In the beginning we used external suppliers, but we decided to replace them with our own products.
Now we also have Dooar available on Mooar to facilitate the exchange of tokens. We have future plans for Dooar, but it’s not our top priority right now.
It works, it has basic functionality, but we are more focused on Mooar now, the NFT marketplace built on Solana and Ethereum and more blockchain.
We also optimize UX. If we want to summarize Mooar, it is currently a zero-fee membership-only launch pad with trading features, and we are focusing on the launch pad now, building the next circle of blue chip NFTs.
This is why we carefully select a handful of projects on a quarterly basis to identify those most likely to succeed. You can see that the projects we launch are NFTs with a tool.
All the NFTs must have a tool and then you are able to grow.
We are also removing the trading fees and we are replacing them with a more sustainable model which is the subscription model.
Although the subscription seems a bit difficult because you don’t trade NFTs too often, there are other products we want to release to make the membership actually worth it.
With the subscription model we are able to explore a wide range of product features, for example now users will have an ecosystem to gain experience and you level up, not just trade.
If you are a high level user, you will have a higher chance of winning, for example when it comes to the launch ramp.
