Ripple now supports NFTs on XRP ledger
Ripple is enabling NFT transactions on the XRP ledger as the latest of several innovations. The introduction of NFTs on XRPL was approved by the Ripple community through a voting process. Launched Ripple 2021 with a $250 million fund to introduce NFTs on XRPL. The NFT support is made possible by the newly enabled interface called “XLS-20” implemented on the XRPL mainnet.
David Schwartz, CTO of Ripple Labs, says, “You’re going to see projects based on things like carbon credits, real estate ownership, and all these different use cases. Anything that can be owned in whole or in part is unique and can be represented by an NFT.”
Accordingly, the company aims to enable mass adoption of tokenization with NFTs to represent real-world objects. Ripple hopes to differentiate itself from previous NFT-compatible blockchains through lower fees, increased processing speed, and improved security. The recipe for success isn’t entirely new, but it’s effective: the XRPL platform will offer high speed and low cost to producers, brands, and marketplaces, supporting new for NFT applications.
It set the stage by signing several cooperation agreements with two NFT marketplaces, Mintable and mintNFT, in 2021, as well as with Chicago-based creative agency VSA Partners. In July, Japan-based financial services firm SBI Holdings declared XRPL a potential NFT trading platform in its report titled “Building a More Sustainable, Scalable and Accessible Future for NFTs with XRPL.” Further, the report reveals that the XRP ledger will not be limited to tokenizing XRP, but will encompass a variety of other assets.
Web3 makes it possible
In a recent tweet, David Schwartz reveals how XRPL is tokenizing: “Tokenization is not new to XRPL, but this is an important milestone for developers and producers to tokenize any assets and build innovative Web3 projects with value. The new standard introduces native NFTs in the XRP ledger to represent unique assets, along with efficient, secure operations to enumerate, transfer and hold such tokens.”
Royalties optional
A debate has recently erupted around NFT royalties in the marketplaces, with Ripple leaning toward making royalties optional. This is also the approach of prominent marketplaces like X2Y2, Magic Eden and LooksRare. The creators’ point of view is understandable: introducing royalties reduces their profits . Nevertheless, fees are necessary to break even, which is why Ripple wants to make it possible for artists to integrate NFT royalties into the chain, which could attract quite a few NFT producers to XRPL.