Snapshot
DMarket is an in-game trading platform. It enables secure in-game item buying, selling, and exchange, to help developers attract and retain more players, increase their revenues, and the LTV of the player. DMarket unlocks the multi-billion-dollar gaming skins economy for game developers and players around the world.
At its' core, Dmarket is an NFT and Virtual In-game items marketplace for the metaverse. They are based on the Ethereum blockchain. There is still much ambiguity around terms related to Web3.0, and understanding what an NFT CMS, Headless CMS for the metaverse, or a Web3.0 CMS could be, is important to understand the context of DMarket's operations. In simpler terms, DMarket is connecting the entertainment industry with the global metaverse, using best-of-breed APIs to bring immersive content and in-game items to Web3.0 "Dapps", or decentralized applications.
The team aimed to build a platform that used the most cutting-edge technology to give its users the ability to easily trade gaming skins.
Hygraph allowed us to work with a tech stack filled with best-of-breed products including GraphQL, Angular, Cloudflare, and Steam. The intuitiveness of the system enabled our engineers to be productive from Day 1 of the project.
The Process
DMarket needed a cloud-hosted SaaS CMS which was reliable, flexible, and built using a future-proof technology. The team ultimately chose Hygraph because it is native in GraphQL and has the flexibility required to manage the DMarket platform. The DMarket team knew that whichever system they chose would hold the core functionality of their entire platform, so the system needed to be able to handle large data sets, have an easy to use API, and be scalable based on their needs.
As an added benefit, DMarket manages their SEO through Hygraph using metatags and reference fields to ensure their website is outperforming competitors. While SEO management was not a requirement for the DMarket team, Hygraph made it easy to set up a SEO metatag system for the marketplace.
Why Hygraph?
The Dmarket team chose Hygraph for the following reasons.
Intuitive Schema Modeling
The Dmarket team needed a system which was flexible enough to manage content for the marketplace and could handle large data sets. DMarket opted for using Hygraph at the core of the marketplace for all of the content including inventory, item descriptions, and buying instructions. The flexible content modeling within Hygraph enabled Dmarket to structure their content to ensure that the content was well structured and could be effectively reused across the platform.
GraphQL Queries and Mutations
The powerful GraphQL APIs enable the team to easily manage the large data sets in an efficient way. Adding content and updating content with GraphQL mutations has ensured that the content is managed programmatically and that the information displayed on the frontend is always up-to-date.
Intuitive UI
The Hygraph UI makes it easy for teams to quickly manually update any content within the CMS. This empowers a wider range of users to make changes within the CMS and keeps the teams working efficiently.
The Current Setup
Since the team was building this new platform from scratch, they opted for technologies which provide flexibility, stability, and resilience to the product. Choosing Angular as the frontend language, Cloudflare as a global CDN, and CrowdIn as a localization tool, DMarket created a static application that is easy to use for their global customer base. The site is also connected to Steam’s open API, which gives them access to a wider audience during the bidding and purchasing process.
To handle transactions and pricing, DMarket is built on distributed ledger technology for transparent and secure transactions. The platform is using machine learning algorithms to programmatically predict pricing and demand.
Results and Benefits
GraphQL was one of the initial reasons the Dmarket tested Hygraph. Hygraph helped mitigate any learning curves of being new to GraphQL.
Hygraph has given their content team a great solution for Headless CMS and SEO.