As DMarket platform development continues, we would like to share a few case studies regarding the newest functionality on the platform. With these case studies we would like to illuminate our development process, user requirements gathering and analysis, and much more. The first case study we’re going to share is “DMarket Wallet Development”: how, when and why we decided to implement functionality which improved virtual items and DMarket Coins collection and transfer.  

DMarket cares about every user, no matter how big or small the user group is. And that’s why we recently updated our virtual item purchase rules, bringing a brand new “DMarket Wallet” feature to our users. So let’s take a retrospective look and find out what challenges were brought to the DMarket team within this feature and how these challenges were met. 

DMarket and Blockchain Virtual Items Trading Rules

Within the first major release of the DMarket platform, we provided you with a wide range of possibilities and options, assuring Steam account connection within user profile, confirmation of account and device ownership via email for enhanced security, DMarket Coins, and DMarket Tokens exchanging, transactions with intermediaries on blockchain within our very own Blockchain system called “Blockchain Explorer”. 

And well, regarding Blockchain... While it has totally proved itself as a working solution, we were having some issues with malefactors, as many of you may already know. DMarket specialists conducted an investigation, which resulted in a perfect solution: we found out that a few users created bots to buy our Founder’s Mark, a limited special edition memorabilia to commemorate the launch of the platform, for lower prices and then sell them at higher prices. Sure thing, there was no chance left for regular users. A month ago we fixed the issue, to our great relief. We received real feedback from the community, a real proof-of-concept. The whole DMarket ecosystem turned out to be truly resilient, proving all our detractors wrong. 

And while we’ve got proof, we also studied how users feel about platform UX since blockchain requires additional efforts when buying or selling an item. With our first release of the Demo platform, we let users sign transactions with a private key from their wallet. In terms of user experience, that practice wasn’t too good. Just think about it: you should enter the private key each time you want to buy or sell something. Every transaction required a lot of actions from the user’s side, which is unacceptable for a great and user-friendly product like ours. That’s why we decided to move from that approach, and create a single unified “wallet” on the DMarket side in order to store all the DMarket Coins and virtual items on our side and let users buy or sell stuff with a few clicks instead of the previous lengthy process. In other words, every user received a public key which serves as a destination address, while private keys were held on the DMarket side in order to avoid transaction signing each time something is traded. This improved usability, and most of our users were satisfied with the update. But not all of them...

You Can’t Make Everyone Happy….. Can You?

By removing the transaction signing requirement we made most of our users happy. Of course, within a large number of happy people, we can always find those who are worried about owning a public key wallet. When you don’t own a public key, it may disturb you a little bit. Sure, DMarket is a trusted company, but there are people who can’t trust even themselves sometimes. So what were we gonna do? Ignore them? Roll back to the previous way of buying virtual items and coins? No!

We decided to go the other way. Within the briefest timeline, the DMarket team decided on providing a completely new feature on Blockchain Explorer — wallet creation functionality. With this functionality, you can create a wallet with 2 clicks, getting both private and public keys and therefore ensuring your items’ and coins’ safety. Basically, we separated wallets on the marketplace and wallets on our Blockchain in order to keep great UX and reassure a small part of users with a needed option to keep everything in a separate wallet. You can go shopping on DMarket with no additional effort of signing every transaction, and at the same time, you are free to transfer all the goods to your very own wallet anytime you feel the need. Isn’t it cool?

Outcome 

After implementation of a separate DMarket wallet creation feature, we killed two birds with one stone and made everyone satisfied. Though it wasn’t too easy since we had a very limited amount of time. So if you need it, you can try it. Moreover, the creation of DMarket wallet within Blockchain Explorer will let you manage your wallet even on mobile devices because with downloading private and public keys you also get a 12-word mnemonic phrase to restore your wallet on any mobile device, from smartphone to tablet. Wow, but that’s another story — a story about DMarket Wallet application which has recently become available for Android users in the Google Play.

Stay tuned for more case studies and don't forget to check out our website and gain firsthand experience with in-game items trading!