Build your own marketplace

A business can open an NFT market on Kadena in two ways — and the most common one requires deploying no smart contract at all. Both rest on PCO-published, frozen on-chain interfaces, so what you build is compatible with the rest of the ecosystem from day one.

Choosing your track

Framework marketplace — deploy nothing

Tokens live in the shared ledger; the framework's settlement engine runs every sale. Your marketplace is:

  • a fee identity named in every seller-signed listing,
  • optionally an auction venue with a settlement crank,
  • a frontend that builds the transactions.

Standalone marketplace — deploy one module

Your own module, your own ledger and custody, your own rules — conforming to the interface standard so wallets, indexers, and aggregators treat you like every other marketplace.

  • Full control of custody and features
  • Audited reference implementation to start from
  • Conformance suite as your acceptance bar

Pick the framework track if your product is the storefront. Pick the standalone track if your product needs its own contract logic. Nothing stops a company from doing both.

Track 1 · A marketplace on the framework

1 · Create your revenue account

A principal account in the sale currency (e.g. coin). This is where your fees land. At listing time, always fetch its live guard from the chain — never hand-build one.

2 · Build the listing flow

Your frontend assembles the seller’s offer with the quote: price, seller payout, and YOUR fee account + rate (up to 10%; charge less as policy). The seller signs; economics bind in state.

3 · Build the buy flow

The buyer signs a transfer of the exact price into escrow plus the purchase continuation. The settlement engine pays your fee automatically — no marketplace code in the loop.

4 · Optional: host auctions

Point listings at the governance-registered auction contracts and run the settlement crank as a service once auctions end (anyone may settle; your crank makes it a product).

5 · Index the events

QUOTE and SETTLED from the settlement engine; TOKEN, SALE, TRANSFER, RECONCILE, SUPPLY from the ledger; ROYALTY from the royalty policy; AUCTION-CREATED / BID / BID-REFUNDED from the auctions. That is the complete data surface a catalog UI needs.

You write no Pact and touch no settlement math.Conservation (money-in = money-out), creator royalties, and escrow discipline are the framework's job — enforced identically for every marketplace. Your fee arrives at your account on the chain where each sale happens.

The step-by-step companion with the exact quote fields lives in the catalog: marketplace quickstart · the field-by-field integration surface is section 10 of the technical reference.

Track 2 · A standalone marketplace on the standard

1 · Start from the reference implementation

Copy royalty-sale from the catalog library (MIT, audited) and adapt namespace, keysets, and fee policy.

2 · Implement the standard, fully qualified

Your module implements nft-asset-v1 / nft-market-v1 (and nft-xchain-v1 if you support chain moves) from the PCO namespace. A private copy of the interfaces is a different type — it does not conform.

3 · Pass the conformance suite

The suite drives your module through an interface reference with adversarial vectors — the same bar every conforming marketplace clears. Passing it is what “compatible” means.

4 · Validate on devnet, then deploy

One class of node-side bug is invisible in the REPL — always run a devnet pass. Then deploy your module only; the interfaces are already published on-chain.

The specification defines the behavior your module must honor beyond the signatures — fail-closed inputs, one conservation-asserted settlement, on-chain economics, explicit sale-only royalty protection, and royalty-safe cross-chain moves. The conformance guide shows how to run the suite against your module.

What you still build yourself

On either track, the on-chain layer does not ship a frontend, an indexer, wallet integration, or a minting UI — those are your product. The catalog's devnet campaigns are working end-to-end references for every transaction your frontend must build, including auction settlement by a third-party crank.

Why build on this instead of rolling your own

  • Trust you don't have to earn alone.Sellers and buyers get the standard's guarantees — checked settlement, unforgeable identity, enforced royalties — from your first day, verifiable on-chain with one describe-module call.
  • Ecosystem compatibility. Conforming marketplaces share wallets, indexers, and aggregators; framework tokens listed with you can have been minted anywhere in the ecosystem.
  • Creator alignment. Royalty enforcement is structural, not a policy page — the creators most worth hosting choose venues where their cut is real.