Current Market
Have you stepped into any of the Monster Market channels over on the @steemmonsters Discord lately? There's a lot going on in the market and it's kind of exciting to watch.
I've been talking with the some of the traders about the lack of transparancy into this market, or really the fact that the data on these transactions is scattered across the blockchain. I began looking at ways to capture these transactions so we can better report on them, but inadvertently stumbled into building my own @steemmonsters market.
I know they are planning an official @steemmonsters market so I'm not sure if this will continue indefinitely, but I'm here for now at least.
Take a look! → steemmonstersdb market
I am beyond excited to announce the steemmonstersdb market!
We now have a @steemmonsters Buy it Now market available to purchase cards for immediate delivery! And then for other cards, you can make offers on the blockchain which will also be delivered automatically if I accept the offer.
This is pretty exciting so let's see how it works.
Complete Inventory
As you may recall, @berniesanders gave me 250 packs and then I bought 110 more packs so now I have a complete inventory of every single regular card in the game! Actually, I have at least two of every card and sometimes a lot more than that!
My intention is to always maintain a full inventory so you can always reliably find any card you are looking for. Today I have only the regular cards but will expand into gold as we move forward.
I have not combined any cards but plan to start building an inventory of those cards as well. If there is a lot of support behind this project I hope to eventually hold at least one of every card available in the game in my inventory here.
Buy it Now
Here is my more than rudimentary card listing. Now, I tried to add pagination and a really nice interface but UI is my weakest area so for now we've got this somewhat clunky interface. The main issue is that I have over 1,800 cards available right now. And this page displays them all at once.
For now, here's a trick. Browse and search my cards in the block explorer and then copy the UID and search for that specific card in the market. I will {air quotes} eventually update this into a better UI. For now, click the link and wait a little bit, once the page loads everything works fine.
The search box on the Buy page is universal and looks at everything in every field, so type 'rare' or a specific card name/UID, or even a particular price. Eventually I'll get this into a better interface, but this should work for now.
When you find a card you want, click the Buy Now button and that will redirect you to steemconnect to make a transfer.
The memo notes the specific card UID and I've got scripts running to watch for this so when your transfer comes in, my script will automatically send that card to your @steemmonsters account as a gift.
When you buy a card here, it will be appear as a gift in your account within a minute or two. Honestly, in my testing it's closer to 40 seconds, but don't hold me to that!
Offer
This market has not even remotely matured yet and there is a lot of uncertainty. For some cards I'm not ready to state a price so I'm just accepting offers.
While there certainly are plenty of traders asking for offers, there isn't a 'bid side' of the market today for buyers to explicitly state an offered price. Or should I say there wasn't.
One major goal I hope to accomplish here is a way for buyers to directly state the prices they are willing to pay in the market. And to make all of this data widely available. As soon as I collect some data I'll build a report so everyone can watch the ongoing bids in the market, as well as the sold buy it now cards.
I have implemented the offer using the escrow functions already available in the blockchain. This is anything but easy to understand so I'll walk through each step.
Escrow Transfer
The first step is to enter your username, the amount of your offer, and the hours to expire. As soon as you sign this transaction, your funds will be removed from your account and held in escrow. Your funds will be released when I accept, decline, or if I do nothing everything is returned to you at the expiration you specify here.
Once you have set these fields click the Offer button, which will send you to steemconnect. Now, this is a firm offer because it literally takes your money as soon as you sign this at steemconnect. It is held in escrow pending the outcome of our transaction.
I've created a separate account @monstersescrow to handle this which I plan to expand further and announce later, but for now it is more transactional.
Accept or Reject
Once you make your offer, I will see this and decide how to respond.
If I reject your offer your STEEM/SBD will be immediately returned, but if I accept the offer I will first transfer the card to your @steemmonsters account as a gift and then @monstersescrow will transfer your payment to me.
I'm glossing over the whole story here because it's kind of messy but let me know if you're interested in how that works.
I know this may all be super confusing and intimidating so please reach out with questions and share your feedback. I want to make this as simple and accomodating as possible so if you have concerns please share them so we can find ways to resolve them and make this an active marketplace.
Initial Pricing
Today I'm only offering Commons and Rares for immediate purchase until I get a better feel for the market. I assume Epics will be in here soon, but honestly I think they are a little undervalued.
Also, my prices will generally be higher than the other traders, in part to drive business back to them, but also because I do believe the market is hesistant and undervaluing these cards so I'd like to see prices climb a bit. You can sort of think of it like Amazon Prime, you're paying a little more for immediate delivery. And frankly, you don't have to install Discord or even talk with me at all!
I've got a lot to figure out, but I'll definitely be tweaking the prices a bit so you may find some great deals.
Other Traders
Establish the market
If you're a trader please don't hate me, I'm not your enemy! I'm hoping to establish some better visibility into the market and publish everything in the blockchain, as well as on steemmonstersdb so it's easily available for everyone to see. It's not quite ready yet, mostly because I don't have real transactions, but I'm going to publish a feed of all my sales and offers so that should definitely help to drive the overall market.
And I offer a premium service so I'll have premium prices, which should drive a lot of the market to the other traders with lower prices. On that, I think we all have the same goal of moving prices upward so please don't feel compelled to competitively lower your prices.
I want to start talking with other traders more to understand how we can work with each other more so than fostering competition. Please comment with your thoughts here or reach out to me privately.
List your cards
While I have a 'complete inventory' of the regular cards, there are countless golds and combined cards that are not in my inventory today. I'm interested in listing your cards that I don't currently hold and I'd take a small commission when they sold.
Just yesterday @yabapmatt announced new updates to @steemmonsters and he mentioned some automation of the custom_json operations used. This is actually a significant move that makes all of the work I'm doing with this market so much simpler, including a way for you to list your cards here.
Even so, building all that out and managing it is a bunch of work, so before I invest any time I'm interested to hear your thoughts. Would you be interested in listing your cards here, and if so, what sort of commission would you be willing to pay?
Since the Buy it Now listings are automated end-to-end I wouldn't need anything significant there, but if you wanted to list cards that accept offers I'd obviously need a slightly bigger cut since that is all handled manually.
And again, I assume I'll soon be snuffed out by the real @steemmonsters market so look at this as a stopgap tool for now.
Follow up on rejected bids
When I reject a bid, you'll see that and if you like the price offered you can contact the buyer to negotiate your own sale. To a large degree, these bids are to the entire market, so I want to report on these very clearly so other traders can follow up to meet those bids.
What's next?
Market Feed
I'm going start publishing a real-time feed of all my market activity. Buy it now sales, offers accepted, offers rejected, everything. All of this began when I was trying to look at the data in the blockchain to report on existing trades so I'm still thinking about ways to capture the other market activity in the blockchain.
A lot of these trades are happening in Discord so it's tough to gauge the going rate of anything so I hope to offer far more visibility into the actual value of the market.
Self-reporting sales
For traders who aren't interested in listing with me, I'm wondering if anyone would be open to self-reporting trades so we can get more visibility. I'm not totally sure what that would look like, but basically just a web form that you could use to submit some trade info that I'd include in my market feed.
Again, this would need to be built so I'd wanna know how much interested and support there is.
Pricing updates
I plan to change my prices constantly. Long term I might even automate this to respond to the market data and adjust real-time. I've seen other traders making minor adjustments to pricing day to day and I will continue with that, just a little more frequently.
Quick tip: my prices are slightly low now and will increase very soon!
Sell it now!
This is what I am most excited about. Once I sell some of my inventory and I have a reasonable amount of liquid SBD/STEEM available I will start buying your cards! Automatically.
I'll create an interface much like the existing block explorer that lets you look at your entire collection, but filtered down to those cards I'm currently interested in buying. Next to each card I'll show my offer and a button that allows you to send the card to me and I'll transfer you the cash. Automatically.
This is basically ready so all I need are a few decent votes on this post and a few sales in the market and I'll have the capital to get started.
Bonded merchant
There is a bonded merchant program at @steemmonsters that allows you to transfer some SBD that they hold to "make whole" anyone you cheat. Obviously, I'm short on liquid capital now, but this is definitely something I will soon invest in.
One thing I'm glossing over here is that I also control the escrow agent, so technically I can steal all your offers. Obviously, this entire thing would immediately crumble if I did that and I think I've established myself as fairly a trustworthy member of the community in my work with @duplibot and @pleasestop so I hope there's enough support behind me to move forward even before I'm properly bonded.
@monstersescrow
This is a real account I created originally to handle escrow trades, but evolved to be a key piece of this marketplace. However, I do see the possibility for this to be available to the community for traditional escrow transactions as well.
You could create an escrow transfer much like my offers and I will be available to handle any disputes that arose in the transaction. The bigger piece here is that I can watch for the transfer of a card in the blockchain and automate this escrow work as well. Sort of, the buyer and seller need to be more directly involved here, but those details can be simplified as much as possible.
Obviously, this only makes sense for valuable trades and to a large degree those traders have already established their trust in the market so I'm not sure how necessary this is now.
This is another thing I'd like to validate and see the level of interest before I invest the time.
Bugs and errors
I dove deep into the matrix to build everything here so I'm certain there's a few bugs. First and foremost, I am carefully watching all transfers and I will manually refund anything if there are any issues but please comment here with any bugs you find so I can fix them quickly.
Your feedback
I'm calling this a market, but if nobody shows up it's just a quiet store full of unwanted inventory. Please share your thoughts and let me know what I got right, but more importantly, what am I missing or what do you completely dislike?
This is all completely new to us all so I'm sure this project will evolve from here and your feedback is what drives this more than anything. In case it's not obvious, I can basically build anything so let me know what you'd like to see in the steemmonstersdb market and let's see where this is going!
It's great for an MVP.
Features I want as a buyer:
I'm sure I'll have more notes lol
Seriously, this is an awesome list of features, thanks so much for taking the time to share these great ideas!
And yeah, calling this an MVP is a bit generous, I can't wait to see what this evolves to because there's plenty of room to grow.
amazing job man!
Thanks for the support!
This is a way cool initiative... i wish you all the success!!
And look forward to all the cool upgrades.
I appreciate that, I'm excited to see this all move forward!
I appreciate
That, I'm excited to see
This all move forward!
- blervin
I'm a bot. I detect haiku.
This is awesome! I already started buying and received my cards. I highly recommend this to everyone. Well done @blervin can't wait to see this evolving!
I'm sure you noticed your first card took a few minutes. The entire blockchain broke last night and the RPC node I was connecting to was behind so I didn't see your transaction right away! Fortunately, I fixed that and the next one was almost instant but now I'm looking at adding some monitoring and failover for the node I'm connecting to so this doesn't happen again.
Thanks so much for your support!
That's fine and it's unlikely that things will run perfectly all the time, some failure sould be expected from time to time. But the other transactions happened instatly, so great job and thank you for providing us with this tool. I'm sure you'll be the supplier of my card collection and many other new comers ;)
Live Post Shout-Out from Real People
Hey - We mentioned you on The Steeming Pile tonight. One of our simulcasters thought this post was awesome or noteable for some reason. The Steeming Pile is An Open Space broadcast for the DLive and Steemit Community and if you’d like to watch or join live, join our chat on the @dlive24hour discord on #thesteemingpile!
That's awesome to hear, thanks for the support!
Wow! This is amazing! I am using this in my Steem Monsters Post for sure, thanks so much for this! Love it! :-)
That's really great to hear, I appreciate the support!