Streamlined marketplace for digital collectible fans

We created an innovative user experience to disrupt the NFT industry and unlock new possibilities for content creators, buyers, and sellers. Together, YLD and Candy developed a cutting-edge platform, changing how fans and collectors engage with their favourite sports, music, art, and cultural icons.

Each team member had a specific purpose, and every developer filled a particular niche to provide a fantastic experience for other developers as we solved their problems.

Infrastructure

We overhauled the infrastructure by implementing a new Kubernetes infrastructure for continuous deployment and integration. To scale the platform to meet the growing demand, we shifted from manual deployment to automated deployment seamlessly.

OpenSearch

Candy recognised they needed a more sophisticated search capability, so we helped them by implementing specialist tools to enhance the platform's functionality.

When they just started, Candy was a simple marketplace that lacked context and depth, including the ability to search NFTs by rarity, price range and more. Although the existing database served its purpose, the basic database search was ineffective. As the platform expanded, there was a strong need for multi-faceted search capabilities.

When we partnered up, we implemented specialist tools such as elastic search and open search, which enabled the deployment of infrastructure on AWS and offloaded the complexity of search while hooking up to it without having to figure out all the algorithms themselves.

Dynamic CMS and end-to-end testing

In the beginning, admin teams that didn’t have software engineering expertise could not self-serve and implement changes on the platform nor easily add more brands and products because there was little to no testing in place.

We then built a CMS-driven platform that empowered developer and non-developer teams to navigate and manage, which opened many doors for opportunities to onboard new brands and tap into a broader audience. The simplicity of this new platform allowed teams to queue up changes to the entire site easily, which would be reflected within a day.

This capability was possible by conducting end-to-end testing, which was not a common practice for them initially. With keen and critical eyes, we identified areas with Candy that required immediate attention and quickly found various problems to fix, identifying the sources of these issues. As a result, we optimised the platform together to be more reliable and user-friendly.

Unified UX & UI

Legacy code can often present significant challenges regarding communication between components and establishing a single source of truth. However, we addressed this problem by adopting an atomic design approach emphasising logical consistency throughout the system.

By leveraging a design systems folder and pattern library to effectively reuse smaller, atomic pieces of code, we ensured that all developers involved in the project understood how the system worked. This approach also allowed us and Candy to share bigger components across multiple applications together, facilitating easier scaling and the reuse of themes and components.

We moved away from subdomains and leveraged the design system to quickly and efficiently incorporate various brand guidelines and colours while maintaining consistency across the application.

With the design system’s scalability and versatility, Candy could now accommodate any functionality or UI requirements for numerous brands showcasing their respective NFTs. Before adopting the design system, building just one page would take up to two weeks, but with the system in place, the same task could be completed in a matter of a few days, thanks to the reusable components and building blocks.