By Alicia Maher
There has been far less hype about the NFT market in the past few months. This is a result of the bearish situation of the wider crypto market. Nevertheless, the NFT developer community at Ripple keeps investing in the market.
Ripple Invests Heavily
Ripple said in September that it was putting in a $250 million investment to aid tokenization growth. It is hoped that it would help the creation of active Ripple NFTs on the XRP Ledger. It will be focused on areas like carbon credits, real estate, and others.
Ripple Labs launched the XRP Ledger 1.9 in April this year. It brought along with it NFT functionalities on the devnet and XLS-20.
The Ripple amendment brings support for NFT tokens. It has been within the reach of developers in the community for some months now. Developers can create apps that let users mint, send, and finally burn NFTs on XRPL.
The amendment was forwarded to be voted on in the last few days in tandem with the amendment process of the XRPL. The process permits changes to happen in protocols after two weeks when it has up to 80% support. There is currently over 80% support for the update of the XRPL amendment version 1.9.2.
Ready for the Next Version
What is special about the protocol is that Ripple NFTs present on the Ledger do not need smart contracts. This is because the minting and other functions are incorporated straight into the Ledger. With that, the developers promise very little risk of negative impacts on the XRPL performance when creating NFTs.
But a warning was also issued via the XRPL blog. Some community members are expressing concerns over the pent-up demand for NFT minting. This is major because activating the XLS-20 has taken so long.
The time to convert Ripple NFTs from the obsolete XLS-14d also takes longer. A lot of collections getting ready for their launch have announced their airdrop dates. These include Astute Scholarz and RPL Wild Stag.
So, when version 1.9.2 is finally activated, there might be increased traffic when minting starts. This would lead to higher costs of transactions and network congestion.
Ripple launched its second cohort of NFT creators on Tuesday. This is part of its $250 million fund. The second phase of the partnership focuses on NFTs in the entertainment sector and plans to get into a wider range of NFT uses.