Marketplaces like OpenSea I'm beginning to think are unnecessary.
Marketplaces effectively act as escrow tools, and an aggregator. There's a good argument to me made for aggregating all the projects in one place to maximize the liquidity and eyes on your project.
But I'm beginning to question the need for their escrow tools. Particularly because there's no reason why the pricing, offer, escrow, and royalty functions can't be built directly into the NFT contract itself.
Presently, I'm directing my team to build a contract that does this. It will have the following features:
- A built-in royalty system, settable by the project owner
- A take-it-from-me function which will allow a token owner to set the price at which they'd be willing to part with this token
- A function which a token owner has to pay to take the token OFF the market for a particular amount of time (tokens are for sale by default)
- A function for an anonymous buyer to post an offer for a particular token
- A function to accept an offer
- A function to pay for an accepted offer to complete the transaction
I may even go as far as to override the default transfer function to make sure that a transaction must happen in order for these tokens to change hands.
With such a system, individual token holders could easily display their tokens on their own website, or sell it through the project's website. I can foresee a situation where a brand allows individual holders to list their tokens on the brand site to make it as easy as possible to find all the tokens for sale, much like the way CryptoPunks are sold. But the applications I have in mind are generally all tied to real world products.
I want to see more experiments in these formats and I'll continue to direct my team to do so and post the contracts as we roll them out.