docs/building-with-ocean/build-a-marketplace/README.md

---
title: Forking Ocean Market
featuredImage: images/creatures/mantaray/mantaray-full@2x.png
description: Forking and customizing Ocean Market (Frontend)
---

# Build a Marketplace

## Outcome

Your own fully functioning customized fork of Ocean Market is deployed and working.

## Introduction

Have you ever thought about monetizing digital assets over the blockchain? Your first instinct might be to head on over to a popular marketplace - but why not create your own marketplace? It’s a lot easier than you might imagine. This guide will cover everything you need to start your own blockchain marketplace in less than an hour. The reason it’s so easy is that we’ll be starting with a fork of Ocean Market, which provides us with some pretty cool tech under-the-hood (if you’re interested in blockchain, read on).

Using Ocean Market is already a big improvement on the alternatives that are out there, but it gets even better. Ocean Market is completely open-source and freely available under the Apache 2 license. This means that you can fork Ocean Market and set up your own marketplace in just a few steps. Ocean Market is primarily focused on monetizing data, but it can actually handle the sale of any digital asset. This guide will walk you through the process of forking Ocean Market and starting your own marketplace for selling photos; you’ll be surprised how easy it is. No prior blockchain knowledge is required!

## Content

The tutorial covers:

* Forking and running Ocean Market locally
* Customising your fork of Ocean market
* Quick deployment of Ocean Market

## Preparation

**Prior knowledge**

If you’re completely unfamiliar with Ocean Market or web3 applications in general, you will benefit from reading these guides first:

* To use your clone of Ocean Market, you’ll need a [wallet](../wallets.md). We recommend [getting set up with metamask](../../orientation/metamask-setup.md).
* You’ll also need some [Ocean tokens on a testnet](../wallets-and-ocean-tokens.md) to use your marketplace.
* When you have the testnet tokens, have a go at [publishing a data asset](../../using-ocean-market/marketplace-publish-data-asset.md) on Ocean Market.
* Run through the process of [consuming a data asset](../../using-ocean-market/marketplace-download-data-asset.md) on Ocean Market.

**Required Prerequisites**

* Git. Instructions for installing Git can be found [here](https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Getting-Started-Installing-Git).
* Node.js can be downloaded from [here](https://nodejs.org/en/download/) (we’re using version 16 in this guide)
* A decent code editor, such as [Visual Studio Code](https://code.visualstudio.com/).
* You’ll need a Github account to fork Ocean market via [Github](https://github.com/).