The Astar Degens Council has been working on a important piece for our Community: a own NFT marketplace. With platforms like Bluez and TofuNFT gone, it’s time for degens to build their own way forward to fill the gap “temporary”.
Right now, the Astar Degens NFT Marketplace is already live on Minato and Shibuya testnets, but this is still before the official testnet launch.
At the moment, the marketplace is focused just on Astar Degens NFTs, with a simple and clean approach: listing, buying, and selling.
We’re reaching out to the Astar Community to ask for your support. We’re specifically looking for a developer to:
Share a second opinion about the approach,
Test the flows thoroughly,
Help ensure everything is solid before we launch officially,
For added safety, we worked with an audited contract , but we know a second opinion and fresh eyes from the community can make all the difference. In return, we offer to list selected community collections on this marketplace as long as there’s no bigger marketplace in place on Astar.
This is our way of supporting the broader Astar NFT ecosystem and helping ensure every collection has a home until something bigger emerges. As a community-driven project, this marketplace is a piece for us all. Let’s make sure it’s rock-solid and ready for launch. If you’re interested in helping out, please comment here or reach out directly. I’ll share more insights and details if there’s someone willing to support .
Now that the major NFT marketplaces are going away, we are very pleased to have a new one.
I understand that it will be Astar Degens only at first, but it is nice to know that it will support selected collections as well.
Let me know if you need any help with testing, etc.
Why doesn’t Astar Degens launch a marketplace on ASTAR/Soneium?
There’s a clear pain point in the ecosystem, we have a treasury, and we have a DAO that could support this initiative and potentially create a future revenue stream — maybe I’m just dreaming big here haha.
Thank you very much. This is quite interesting because as we understand, previously many NFT Marketplaces have shut down. Anyway, may I ask a bit more?
In terms of the product, I have full confidence in the team, no problem there. But if we’re talking about value proposition, I understand that creating a marketplace for people to browse and shop is a good thing, but currently the NFT market isn’t in the same trend as before. What plans does the team have to deal with this, or what lessons learned from other places? =)
Hi, we worked a lot with NFT Bridges to ensure we’re multichain, meaning our NFTs can live on both Astar and Soneium. I think we did our homework and catched a lot of interest. But after our recent AMA with NFT Bridges, Astar, and Soneium, a lot of new people joined our Discord and immediately asked, “Where can we buy your NFT on ASTAR?” Our answer was: there’s no marketplace right now its closed since yesterday. That’s really frustrating—our home is Astar but how is an NFT project supposed to work without a place to buy or trade?
I never planned to set up this marketplace without TofuNFT. Ideally, TofuNFT would have been the place to go, but since it’s currently closed, we needed another option to give our community a possibility to trade their NFTs. That’s why i searched for a low-coding solution—none of us in the council are blockchain developers, so building the blockchain components ourselves wasn’t an option.
So, we decided to work with audited contracts and picked following solution. So it’s already live on testnet—i don’t like empty promises
This is the First version:
For us, this part isn’t about making money—it’s about giving our community a place to buy, sell. For Soneium its here connected but we will focus on our Posse partnership and Opensea. i don’t believe in big profits based on revenue and Sales of NFT Last months.
Thanks for the questions — they really help to shape the target picture.
Our next newsletter will explain more about the dual chain strategy — so we’ll need a few more days before publishing.
In advance: each community member will be able to keep their assets on Astar or bridge them to Soneium. We’re not aiming to compete with Marketplaces like Posse, as we work closely together on an other project/idea or Opensea. It’s more about filling the current gap on the AstarEVM side. Its set up to minimize running costs (close to zero) and keep things easy as possible. I think this is necessary if we calculate with twenty five sales per month with a royalty of 2 -3%.
Based on this, I’ve adjusted the layout to make things clearer.
I think it’s very realistic.
Other NFT marketplaces are withdrawing because they cannot generate enough revenue to cover their costs, so we cannot ignore that fact. Please proceed within the limits of what is sustainable.
Great guys, I’m just worried that the NFT field is in free fall, but that doesn’t mean you have to give up, you have to keep going, I just have one recommendation that could be a game changer for the marketplace:
think about how to improve trading, not only focus on the listing but also on the dynamics of how to make NFTs more liquid on the platform, because liquidity has always been a problem for NFTs.
You’re absolutely right—liquidity has always been one of the biggest challenges in the NFT space. That’s why we had implemented a monthly manual buyback where the DAO used $500/month to buy back NFTs from holders who wanted to step out. This helped maintain some level of liquidity, while making sure the buyback price stayed below our treasury/NFT ratio to protect sustainability.
We temporarily paused this initiative due to the TofuNFT shutdown. At this point, the DAO holds 125 NFTs, which we actively use in campaigns to increase engagement and activity—so no burns.
If you have more concrete suggestions around liquidity mechanisms, feel free to share!
I really commend the Astar Degens team for taking on the challenge of building a homegrown marketplace—it’s no small feat. Even the biggest players in the space struggle with liquidity and traction, so I respect the initiative here.
Since you asked for suggestions, I wanted to share that SFY Labs has committed to listing ApeXChimpz NFTs on their upcoming multi-chain marketplace (which they will eventually develop if their UCG proposal goes ahead and they have achieved pre-requisite milestones in advance).
I am in agreement with @Vangardem that this is indeed a difficult time for NFT projects, and having more infrastructure options could really help the Astar ecosystem.
I’d love to see the Astar (and specifically fellow NFT projects) community show some support for @SFY_Labs UCG proposal. Their marketplace could be a game-changer—not just for existing collections but for onboarding new creators to Astar. From what we’ve seen, they’d be happy to include the Degens (and every other project on Astar) and even run drops using the treasury NFTs you’re holding.
They’re also expanding to multiple EVM chains, which could bring in new eyes and fresh energy to Astar’s NFT scene. Worth considering as part of the broader growth strategy you guys are probably analyzing right now.
Anyway, would love to see you guys make some noise and outline how much this infrastructure would benefit you guys also.
Look at Evrloot - absolutely killing it with their game and marketplace and they show it is possible to be hugely successful in a sustainable way. They are the gold standard of NFT projects right now and that is because they have the full support of Moonbeam to be allowed to flourish.
I completely agree with the points mentioned. The NFT Marketplace landscape is changing quite rapidly, so people aren’t sure which ones are actually NFT Marketplaces. Right now, this should be a good opportunity for Astar Degens. I’m rooting for you wholeheartedly. =)
Great, you have always been attentive to look for liquidity solutions, the truth is that this is the main problem of NFTs and that you have detected it before is a very good sign, to solve the liquidity problem I have much more advanced suggestions, I will have them there to share them, let’s hope that the NFT market in general will improve.
this is the attitude that I look for in the members of the community and in the teams, sometimes I feel that I see myself as a detractor before some teams, but in reality I look for with my comments that we can all align in a single direction where you can stomp, there are many challenges I am aware of it however nothing is impossible as you mentioned with Evrloot, the idea is that the products are self-sustainable to become blue chips and references in the ecosystem so the demand must be maximum.
A functional product opens the doors to many other benefits, the community must be there to test them, use them and create their own strategies, that’s what it’s all about guys, I like this kind of conversations and feedback, I’ll be here.
First of all, I would like to congratulate you on this idea.
The NFT market is in a pretty bad state, and Astar does not have many blue-chip collections. However, in times like these, it is necessary to be prepared for good markets. The NFT Marketplace is currently a gap in Astar, and it will be a necessity rather than an option for future NFT-focused projects. Thank you in advance for your efforts. If I come up with any creative ideas, I will share them with you here.
