NFT.io

Overview

NFT.io is a peer-to-peer marketplace and explorer that lets people browse Cardano NFTs and trade them directly between wallets. It is aimed at Cardano collectors who want to swap NFTs without parking them in a centralized exchange account. Both the listings and the swap mechanism live on a single web app, so a visitor can search a collection, connect a wallet, and trade in the same place.

NFT.io is built around self-custody, meaning users keep their NFTs and ADA in their own wallet rather than depositing them with the marketplace. Assets stay in the user's Cardano wallet until a trade settles on-chain, and the project does not hold customer funds. The team behind it is small: founder Catalin Calistru and co-founder Eduard Caslariu, who together filed a Project Catalyst Fund 12 proposal to expand the site into a full Cardano NFT search engine¹. The contract source backing the live marketplace is not yet settled in public documentation: the About page names the cardano-aftermarket protocol², while a separate post on the project's X account attributes the contracts to Mesh.

Key Features

• Wallet-to-wallet trading. Trades route through a Cardano smart contract (a small program that runs on the Cardano blockchain and moves both sides of a trade at the same time) instead of a centralized order book, so neither side has to send their NFT to a marketplace account before the swap completes.
• NFT explorer for any Cardano collection. Browse native assets by collection, identified by a policy ID (the unique identifier a project uses to mint its NFTs), or by individual asset fingerprint (the unique identifier of a single NFT), including community projects like SpaceBudz, Wolf Syndicate, and Boozy Ape.
• Wallet portfolio view. Look up any Cardano wallet and see the NFTs it holds, useful for verifying counterparties or exploring what a creator owns.
• Search across asset categories. The site sorts NFTs into categories such as music, media, documentation, and identity, with a Catalyst-stage roadmap to add AI-powered image and text similarity search¹.
• Open-source contract primitives. Both candidate contract bases, cardano-aftermarket and Mesh, are open-source Cardano libraries.

What to Expect

A visitor lands on a clean Cardano-themed interface with a search bar and a feed of recent collections. Connecting a wallet such as Lace, Eternl, or Nami unlocks the "Market" tab, where users can list NFTs for swap and accept incoming offers. The flow stays inside the browser, with no separate desktop app, no account signup, and no email address required, only a wallet signature.

Trade settlement happens on the Cardano network, so each swap takes a normal Cardano block time to confirm. Fees come from the network itself rather than from a posted marketplace commission, and the site does not publish its own fee schedule, so the transaction summary in the wallet is the place to confirm fees before signing.

The most detailed public statement of intent is the Fund 12 Catalyst proposal¹, which was not approved by community voters but lays out the team's plan and identifies the founders. No independent third-party security audit has been published, and the contract source attribution remains unresolved between cardano-aftermarket and Mesh.