The First Marketplace

A single contract and collection were active during the first 7 months of Flow and It was A.c1e4f4f4c4257510.Market better known as the NBA TopShot Market, Launched by Joshua Hannan (Dapper Labs) and Dieter Shirley (Axiom Zen) This contract was the foundation for developers who wanted to build their Marketplaces as everything was properly documented.

DarkCountryMarket and ChainMonsterMarketplace were the next marketplace contracts that appeared in Flow, and their deployment code was inspired by the former "Market" contract, however, each one has its unique perks.

DarkCountry added a Staking function, meanwhile ChainMonster added a Rewards function.
Both Marketplaces were active for a large number of days with activity recorded in 2023.

The Next TopShotMarket

The TopShotMarketV3 contract was built over the previous contract adding a new function called TopShotLocking allowing NFTs to be locked and earn rewards.

This contract is still used today being the top 1 marketplace contract in Flow.

New Marketplaces contracts appeared taking inspiration on the "Market" contract (MintStoreMarketFactory) or the "TopShotMarketV3" (OlympicPinMarket) also StarlyCardMarket appeared.

A new era for Flow Marketplaces: The NFT Storefront contract standard

If you wanted to sell your NFT collection before, you needed to create your own contract using the "Market" contract as an example, but this was a problem if you didn't know how to develop in Flow and you needed one contract per collection.

The launch of this contract allowed everyone to use a public and secure contract to launch their own marketplaces resulting in the contract with the most NFT Collections in Flow.

Every NFT Collection of this contract has the potential to be a single Marketplace in Flow for a project.

What Happened Afterwards? Introducing Offers

"Independent" Marketplaces were still arriving into Flow in 2022 but most of them started to suffer alongside the bear trend, and the community started to lose interest in these Marketplaces.

In May a new marketplace contract appeared called Offers which allowed dapper users to trade their TopShot NFTs without the need for the primary market.

Finally in August NFTStorefront launched their v2 contract which improved the original version and Offers announced their v2 contract that allowed dapper users to trade more sports collections than TopShot.

The StoryLife of Marketplaces in Flow