How I'd Build an NFT Marketplace in 2025

Jesse Walden, a founder and managing partner of Variant, recently asked an interesting question:

The tweet got many dozens of replies. Many of the responders said they'd focus on better discovery flows, others said they'd offer better display options, etc.

But I thought one of the most interesting comments came from 0xDesigner, who said:

I agree with that line of thought. And I'd invert it if I was building NFT marketplace infra in 2025. In other words, I'd focus on offering cool stuff to do, and work backwards to buying/selling as supportive and secondary.

This way, you wouldn't have to compete directly with the heavyweights like OpenSea and Magic Eden. And you'd also have the opportunity to make a platform that's useful and interesting beyond just crypto users.

For example, consider the thought experiment of an app that mixes elements of Figma, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, and so forth. We can just call it Tableau as a stand-in for now.

It could be centered around "Curations," "Badges," and "Profiles."

Tableau's "Curations" product could be like Pinterest Boards juiced with Figma-like functionalities:

• People could open a draft and upload pictures or connect NFTs they own (or link ones they don't own), then use the visual editor system to organize their elements how they want—drag, expand, flip, etc. Drafts could stay private or be published for everyone to see.
• You could also offer drop-in text boxes in these spaces, so people can make personal notes, public blogs, annotated exhibitions, and more. You'd also have the option of referral splits, so if someone finds an NFT and buys it through a curated board, the board's creator would earn a small cut.
• Accordingly, "Curations" would have many use cases beyond simple idea boards. Content creators could use them for graphics. Writers could use them for posts with elaborate visuals. Artists could use them as custom storefronts for their works. Curators could use them to build digital galleries.
• Under the hood, an NFT marketplace aggregator protocol could be built to handle any secondary transactions facilitated here, or to support primary mints and sales if artists want to bring new pieces into their "Curations."

Then Tableau's second main pillar could be "Badges," which could be used by people to track personal achievements or to share publicly as lists:

• What if you finished 25 books this year? Or hiked 50 miles last week? Or what if you and your friends just went in on a CryptoPunk together? Or just graduated from college? It'd be neat to have streamlined place where you can commemorate and organize milestones, big or small, personal or collective.
• As such, "Badges" would basically be like a DIY custom Pokémon badges creator flow, but instead of earning badges by beating digital gym leaders, you could make them for whatever achievements you want and then organize them across different personal lists.
• Again, you'd be able to upload pictures or connect NFTs for this process, after which they'd be cute-ified into emblems that you could drag and drop into lists, annotate, share, etc.
• For this offering, Tableau could also partner with artists to release special limited-edition badges as NFTs, which would be another avenue for primary sales atop the underlying NFT marketplace infra. Non-partner users could make limited-edition or open-edition badges for others to mint, too.

Of course, lastly "Profiles" would tie these two pillars together and host users' respective Curation boards and Badges.

Here, you could tap into X's and Farcaster's social graphs, so people could quickly find and follow folks that they follow elsewhere. Profiles would also be great for artists, as they could use this flow to host multiple custom storefronts via their Curations.

There are various other embellishments possible on top of this foundation. A dedicated "Discover" tab could make sense, where you could click through random recommendations based on the NFTs you've already collected or on the curations of the people you follow.

Is this app idea revolutionary? I don't think so. But I'd certainly use something like this, even if just for notes, moodboards, and wishlists.

And it'd appeal to many types of users, which is the grand point. Give people interesting and useful things to do—even normies that aren't into crypto—and let the optional buying and selling and NFT market infra be downstream of that.

All that's to say, if I was building an NFT marketplace in 2025, I wouldn't build it as a marketplace per se. I'd try to make a new kind of broadly appealing social curation platform and cake a bespoke onchain NFT protocol within it that supports aggregation, listings, splits, mints, etc.

This is just my two gwei and some food for thought. Though if anyone actually decides to build something like Tableau, please let me know—I'll happily be your first user!