Non-fungible tokens have quickly gone from another fancy concept on blockchain to a widely used instrument leveraging a big deal of benefit to digital artists, brands, and even medicine and logistics. While the latest concentrate on the technical features of NFT, brands and digital artists rather focus on its cultural potential.
The unobvious yet most widespread problem surrounding the NFT launch process for a mortal human is a complete – or almost complete – profanity in terms of blockchain technical knowledge. Understanding this, SaaS suppliers took the direction of leveraging the simplicity and user-friendliness of their UI/UX, making convenience an ace in the hole.
The house starts with a threshold, and a SaaS application starts with a dashboard: this is the very first area a user goes to after logging in. Let’s talk about how to properly structure data on different NFT-centered platforms, review some compelling cases and analyze Lazarev.’s experience in the matter.
NFT platform types and their dashboard’s specifics
Normally, dashboards provide an at-a-glance view of software’s main functions and options, serving as user’s home page (or main menu). Any product design’s supertask is to enable a user to achieve a wanted result without much effort and with due comfort. Accordingly, each platform’s dashboard layout will look different: it will depend both on the user’s role and the key platform’s idea. To properly analyze different platforms' dashboard database structures, let’s first go through the main types of NFT platforms.
1. Curated marketplaces
Curated NFT marketplaces are sometimes custodial, meaning that an uploaded NFT is stored on the platform, not in an artist’s wallet. It also means that minting NFT will only be available for the approved selected artist, which means that the functionality of minting an NFT is not available on the dashboard. A good example of such a marketplace is Nifty Gateway, or an NFT platform Foundation.
Because of the platform’s specifics, Nifty Gateway’s user dashboard is concentrated on storing personal information and managing purchased NFTs.
2. P2P marketplaces
Peer-to-peer NFT marketplaces allow users to create and trade their NFTs freely with one another. They are non-custodial, meaning that minted NFTs are stored in the creator’s wallet. The most popular examples of P2P platforms are OpenSea, Rarible, and Mintable.
As a display on P2P marketplaces doesn’t go through artistic curation, the mechanism of creating and listing one’s NFT is available on the user’s dashboard along with other previously mentioned info like wallet, personal data, purchased pieces, et cetera.
3. P2E games marketplaces
Play-to-earn (P2E) games are blockchain-based video games where players interact with digital assets and obtain crypto rewards. These games can have different mechanics and gameplay, but what they have in common is cryptocurrency usage in-game universe or as a game currency. The most popular examples are Axie Infinity and Sandbox.
Let’s take a closer look at Axie Infinity’s mechanics to understand the game’s user path. Axie Infinity focuses on producing Pokemon-like animals (in form of NFTs) that can engage in combat, develop in power, and be sold and purchased on the game’s marketplace. To start playing, the user has to buy three Axies with Ethereum, which is most conveniently done on the mentioned marketplace.
P2E games marketplaces carry a function that is drastically different from conventional NFT marketplaces. Accordingly, a user dashboard looks more like a user inventory than a panel for managing purchases and sales: the UI primarily focuses on the number of owned digital assets and user info rather than the history of newly acquired or sold items.
4. B2B platforms
There are only so many types of platforms for NFT that either create, store, or work with non-fungible tokens; however, most of them are targeted at individual artists rather than brands. The NFT B2B platforms’ ultimate goal is to enable brands to fit the complete technical process length into one platform, where it’s possible to mint and distribute the new tokens to other B2C platforms. These, for instance, are Mnemonic, Manifold, or Metastaq.
B2B platforms dashboards differ slightly from conventional NFT marketplaces, offering a more extensive set of instruments to interact with NFTs. For instance, in Metastaq, a dashboard showcases releases and their performance, API integrations, sales summary, wallets, and other related technical data.