Building an NFT Auction Platform on Solana
Technical deep dive into building an NFT auction platform on Solana - architecture decisions, challenges with Solana development, and lessons learned.
So I don't know, man, I've been sitting here thinking about this project I built last year and I guess I want to talk about it because like, it was such a wild experience. I built this NFT auction platform called cryptoisreal.com and honestly? I thought I knew what I was doing but I had no idea how complex this whole thing would get.
Let me just walk through the whole story because there's so much that happened - the good stuff, the really frustrating parts, and those moments where I'm just staring at my screen at 2am thinking "why did I decide to do this?"
So This Idea Started Bouncing Around My Head
Okay so the whole thing started because I was getting really frustrated with the NFT space. Like, I'd see these auction platforms and think, this is supposed to be democratizing art and ownership, right? But then you try to actually use them and you're paying like $50 in gas fees just to place a bid. It's insane.
I kept thinking about this - like, auctions are supposed to be this fair thing where whoever wants something the most wins, but in reality it's just whoever has the most money to burn on transaction fees. That doesn't feel democratic at all.
And the name "cryptoisreal" - man, I spent way too much time thinking about this. But it came from this feeling that crypto and NFTs were becoming real parts of people's lives, but all the infrastructure felt so gatekeepy and expensive. I wanted to build something that actually felt accessible, you know?
Okay So Why Solana? (This Decision Kept Me Up at Night)
Man, so choosing Solana was like... I knew it was probably the right technical decision but I was also terrified I was making a huge mistake. This was 2021, right? And everyone's telling me "dude, Ethereum is where all the users are, Solana is way too experimental, you're crazy."
But like, I sat down and actually did the math. On Ethereum, if someone wants to place a bid in an auction, they're paying $30-50 in gas fees. Maybe more. On Solana? Like $0.00025. It's not even close, man. I'm thinking, how can I possibly build a platform where regular people can afford to actually use it?
And the performance thing - god, this was driving me crazy. I wanted real-time bidding where you could see bids coming in live, not waiting around for block confirmations. Ethereum with those 15-second block times just wasn't going to work for what I had in my head.
I think I spent like two weeks just diving deep into the Solana ecosystem, trying to figure out if this thing was actually stable enough to build on. The network was having these outages back then and I'm like, shit, am I building on something that's going to fall apart? But I kept coming back to the same thing - what's the point of building on the most stable network if nobody can afford to use what you build?
Learning Rust Was Like Learning a New Language (Literally)
Okay so I had to learn Rust. Coming from JavaScript and Python, this was... man, this was rough. The ownership model, the borrowing, the lifetimes - my brain just was not wired for this at all.
I remember I spent three full days - like three entire days - just trying to understand why my simple auction program wouldn't compile. The error messages were so cryptic, dude. I'd be like "okay, I need to create an auction account" and Rust is throwing this error at me: "cannot borrow ctx.accounts.auction as mutable more than once." And I'm sitting there like, what the hell does that even mean?
But then something clicked, right? The account model is actually pretty elegant once you wrap your head around it. Instead of shoving everything into one massive smart contract like Ethereum, you have these separate accounts that hold data, and your program just operates on them. It's more like... think of it as a database where your smart contract is basically a stored procedure.
#[account]
pub struct Auction {
pub creator: Pubkey,
pub nft_mint: Pubkey,
pub highest_bid: u64,
pub highest_bidder: Pubkey,
pub end_time: i64,
pub settled: bool,
}
#[derive(Accounts)]
pub struct CreateAuction<'info> {
#[account(
init,
payer = creator,
space = 8 + 32 + 32 + 8 + 32 + 8 + 1,
seeds = [b"auction", nft_mint.key().as_ref()],
bump
)]
pub auction: Account<'info, Auction>,
#[account(mut)]
pub creator: Signer<'info>,
pub nft_mint: Account<'info, Mint>,
pub system_program: Program<'info, System>,
}
The seeds and bump thing took me forever to understand. Like, why can't I just create an account with a random address? But then I realized it's about predictable account addresses - you can always derive the same auction account address from the NFT mint address. Pretty clever, actually.
The Frontend Actually Broke My Brain More Than Rust
So I thought the Rust part was going to be the thing that killed me, but honestly? The frontend gave me way more headaches. Wallet integration on Solana in 2021 was just... it was rough, man. Phantom was pretty much the only wallet people used, but even that was buggy as hell sometimes.
I built the frontend with React and the Solana web3.js library. But the real-time bidding part - god, this was tricky. I needed to show live updates as people placed bids, but I also had to handle all these edge cases where transactions would fail or just sit there forever waiting to confirm.
const handleBid = async (bidAmount) => {
try {
setIsLoading(true);
const tx = await program.methods
.placeBid(new BN(bidAmount))
.accounts({
auction: auctionAccount,
bidder: wallet.publicKey,
bidderAta: bidderTokenAccount,
systemProgram: SystemProgram.programId,
})
.rpc();
// Wait for confirmation
await connection.confirmTransaction(tx, "confirmed");
// Update UI
setCurrentBid(bidAmount);
setIsLoading(false);
} catch (error) {
console.error("Bid failed:", error);
setIsLoading(false);
// Show error to user
}
};
The error handling was absolutely brutal. Solana transactions can fail for like fifty different reasons - insufficient funds, account doesn't exist, wrong program derivation, network congestion, who knows what else. I had to build this whole system to catch all these different error types and actually show users something meaningful instead of just "transaction failed."
And transaction confirmation times - man, don't even get me started. Sometimes a transaction would show as "confirmed" but then just get dropped from the block later. I had to implement this whole retry logic where if a transaction didn't show up after a certain time, we'd retry it with a higher priority fee. It was like playing whack-a-mole with edge cases.
The Marketing Campaign That Actually Worked (And Cost Me $2000)
Okay so this was probably the most fun part of the whole thing. I decided to do this guerrilla marketing campaign with billboards around Austin during SXSW. The idea was just to put up these really simple, kinda mysterious messages like "this is an nft," "make the money better," and "crypto is real" on billboards around the city.
I spent $2,000 on three billboards for a week. I know, I know, it sounds absolutely insane for a side project, but I figured like, if I'm going to build this thing, I might as well go all in on the marketing too, right?
The response was crazy. People started tweeting about the billboards left and right, and I got like 500 signups in one week just from that campaign. David Ticzon from Sui even tweeted about it, which was pretty cool.
I think what worked was just how simple and mysterious the messaging was. People would drive by and see "crypto is real" on a billboard and be like "what the hell is that about?" So they'd google it, find cryptoisreal.com, and discover this NFT auction platform. It was perfect.
The Technical Stuff That Almost Made Me Quit
Man, there were so many technical challenges that I just did not see coming. Like, the auction settlement logic - I thought this would be straightforward but it was way more complicated than I expected. You have to handle the case where someone outbids themselves, where the auction ends but nobody bids, where the NFT transfer fails, where the payment fails... it just goes on and on.
The biggest issue though was network congestion. Solana was having these periods where the network would get really congested, and transactions would just sit there for like ten minutes. I'm getting users complaining that their bids aren't going through, and I'm looking at the blockchain explorer seeing their transactions just stuck in pending. It was so frustrating.
I ended up implementing this priority fee system where the platform would automatically bump the transaction fee during congestion periods. It helped, but it also meant that during busy times, users were paying more for transactions, which kind of defeated the whole point of using Solana in the first place.
pub fn settle_auction(ctx: Context<SettleAuction>) -> Result<()> {
let auction = &mut ctx.accounts.auction;
// Check if auction has ended
let current_time = Clock::get()?.unix_timestamp;
require!(current_time >= auction.end_time, ErrorCode::AuctionNotEnded);
// Check if already settled
require!(!auction.settled, ErrorCode::AlreadySettled);
// Transfer NFT to winner
if auction.highest_bidder != Pubkey::default() {
token::transfer(
CpiContext::new(
ctx.accounts.token_program.to_account_info(),
token::Transfer {
from: ctx.accounts.creator_nft_account.to_account_info(),
to: ctx.accounts.winner_nft_account.to_account_info(),
authority: ctx.accounts.creator.to_account_info(),
},
),
1,
)?;
// Transfer payment to creator
**ctx.accounts.creator.to_account_info().try_borrow_mut_lamports()? += auction.highest_bid;
**ctx.accounts.escrow.to_account_info().try_borrow_mut_lamports()? -= auction.highest_bid;
}
auction.settled = true;
Ok(())
}
The escrow logic was probably the most stressful part of this whole thing. Like, you're handling real money here, and if you screw up the escrow, people literally lose their funds. That kept me up at night, man. I tested this thing probably a hundred times on devnet, trying to break it in every conceivable way.
What I Actually Learned About Building on Solana
So after going through this whole experience, here's what I learned about Solana development:
The tooling is still rough - This was 2021, so maybe it's better now, but man, the debugging experience was painful. When your program failed, you'd get these cryptic error codes that told you basically nothing. I spent so much time just trying to figure out what went wrong.
Account rent is a real thing - You have to pay rent for keeping accounts alive on Solana. It's not much money, but it's something you have to factor into your economics from the beginning.
Program upgrades are weird - Unlike Ethereum where once you deploy a contract it's immutable, Solana programs can be upgraded. This is powerful but also terrifying - you can accidentally break everyone's data if you're not careful.
The community is smaller but way more engaged - Building on Solana, you're working with a much smaller developer community, but people are actually really helpful. I got help in Discord channels that I never would have gotten in Ethereum communities. People actually respond.
Transaction confirmation is way more complex than you think - "Confirmed" doesn't mean what you think it means. You have to understand the different confirmation levels and what they actually guarantee, which took me forever to wrap my head around.
The Results (And Why I Had to Shut It Down)
So the platform launched and we had some decent activity. We got about 50 auctions running through the platform, maybe $10,000 in total volume. Not huge, but not nothing either, you know?
The problem was the NFT market was changing so fast. By the time I actually got the platform built and launched, the whole hype around NFT auctions was already dying down. People were moving on to other stuff, and the user acquisition costs were getting really expensive.
I also realized that running an auction platform is way more work than just building it. You need customer support, you need to handle disputes when things go wrong, you need to constantly market to get new users. I was spending more time on operations and support than actually building and coding, which just wasn't what I wanted to be doing.
The final nail in the coffin was when Solana had that massive outage in September 2021. The network was down for like 17 hours, and I had active auctions running. I had to manually extend auction times and deal with really angry users who couldn't access their money. That's when it hit me - building on a newer blockchain comes with these risks that you just can't control, no matter how good your code is.
What I'd Do Differently (If I Had to Do It Again)
If I were to build this again, here's what I'd do differently:
Start with a way simpler MVP - I totally over-engineered the first version. I should have just built basic auction functionality and iterated from there instead of trying to build everything at once.
Focus way more on community - The successful NFT platforms aren't really about the technology, they're about building a community of creators and collectors. I focused too much on the tech and not enough on the people.
Have a clearer monetization strategy - I was taking a 2.5% fee on auctions, but I never really thought through whether that was actually sustainable for the business long-term.
Build for multiple chains from day one - Being Solana-only limited my potential user base way too much. I should have built the architecture to support multiple blockchains from the beginning.
Actually talk to users before building - I built what I thought people wanted, but I didn't spend nearly enough time actually talking to potential users about what they actually needed.
Advice If You're Thinking About Building NFT Stuff
If you're thinking about building an NFT platform, here's what I'd tell you:
Pick your battles really carefully. The infrastructure is complex, but honestly the real challenge is building a sustainable business. Make sure you understand not just the technical stuff, but the market dynamics and how much it's going to cost to actually get users.
Start with a specific niche. Don't try to build the next OpenSea right away. Find a specific community or use case and build something really good for them first. Get that working before you try to expand.
Think about cross-chain from day one. Users don't actually care about blockchain ideology - they care about cost, speed, and where their friends are. Build for multiple chains if you possibly can.
The auction mechanics matter way more than you think. There are so many ways people can game auction systems. You need to really think through bid increments, timing, reserve prices, and all these edge cases that you won't think of until they happen.
User education is absolutely huge. Most people still don't understand how NFTs work, let alone how to use a new platform. You need to budget real time and resources for education and onboarding, not just assume people will figure it out.
So yeah, that's the whole story of cryptoisreal. It was such a wild ride, man. I learned so much about Solana development, about building consumer products in crypto, and about what it actually takes to ship something real in this space.
The platform is shut down now, but I still have all the code, and honestly? I'm still proud of what we built. It was ambitious, it was technically challenging, and even though it didn't become the next big thing, it taught me so much about what I want to build next.
Sometimes you build something not because it's going to be the next unicorn, but because you learn things in the process that you just can't learn any other way. And I think that's kind of the whole point, right? You build stuff, you learn, you iterate, you build the next thing better.
That's all I wanted to say about this project. Maybe I'll build something similar again someday, but with everything I learned from this experience. We'll see.