Immutable X Marketplace

When the fees cost more than the cards

In a game, getting and trading items should be fun, with a quick payoff. On a blockchain it was the opposite. Every trade was written into one shared public ledger, slowly and for a fee, like paying a courier twenty dollars to swap a two-dollar trading card. Worse, every trade joined the same queue as everyone else's, so busy games slowed things down for everyone using it.

Not long after I joined, it became clear to all of us that we couldn't grow that way, though it took a while longer before the time was right to act. Trading thousands of game items of every value cost more than it was worth, to players or to us. And if games like ours took off, the road would only get more crowded.

Faster trading, and proof it could be trusted

We needed a far more efficient way to trade that kept the security and finality players expected. The answer was to build it ourselves, for our own games and for any other game: help grow the whole industry, while owning the ground it was built on.

Immutable X bundled thousands of trades into a single entry on the main ledger, rather than writing each one separately. Think of a courier filling a truck instead of making a trip per parcel: players could make thousands of trades for the cost of one. Competitors were moving toward something similar, and we wanted to be first. My job was a marketplace, in six weeks, that showed players the new system was reliable and trustworthy.

Six weeks, one slice a week

Go where the gap was

To build it, the company split a new platform team off from the game team. They'd been making tools for our own game; now they would make tools for any game. I was on the game team, but went with them: otherwise nobody on the platform team would ever have made a game, and they needed someone with fast-turnaround MVP experience. I hired my own replacement on the game team and a UI designer for each team, and became manager of the design group.

Build so we could test further each week

Reliability and trust are in short supply in that world, so they were what players valued most. Seeing their items safely in motion mattered more than any feature. I wrote the user stories for each week-long sprint, ordered so every week we could test the journey a little further end to end:

1. WalletCreate or connect a wallet account.
2. InventorySee everything in it.
3. Move inMove items from the main ledger onto Immutable X.
4. ListList items for trade, and browse what others listed.
5. TradeBuy and sell.
6. Move outMove items back to the main ledger, any time.

First of its kind, and trusted

• Firstof its kind to market, ahead of competitors working on the same idea.
• 10,362trades in the alpha's first 24 hours, saving players an estimated $414,000 in fees, at about $40 a trade on the main ledger (Crypto Briefing).
• Freetrades, settled immediately, where each had cost a fee and a wait.
• Trustedby players: easy to use by the standards of its world, and transparent about where every item was.

That success also brought TikTok to us, later in 2021, for TikTok Top Moments.