NFTs, CBDCs could soon be coming to Polkadot

Apart from a CoinMarketCap glitch that pushed its price above $4,000, Polkadot [DOT] – like many other cryptos – has been seeing a holiday season filled with red. At press time, DOT was trading at $26.11, after a ‘hike’ of 0.26% in 24 hours.

Aside from its price performance, the Polkadot community has also been following the parachain slot auctions. However, there is a fresh news update from the Polkadot ecosystem – one that could excite many creators.

Sign on the dotted line

According to an official tweet by the project, Motion 131 is set to be voted upon as Referendum 46.

What happens if the vote goes through? Well, a lot of things. But, one end result is that users will be able to mint their own NFTs on the blockchain. This would be done by upgrading Polkadot’s Shell parachain to the Statemint parachain and interface.

Polkadot Wiki reported,

“Beyond merely supporting assets, integrating Statemint into your systems has several benefits for infrastructure providers and users –

• Support for on-chain assets.
• Significantly lower transaction fees (about 1/10) than the Relay Chain.
• Significantly lower deposits (1/10) than the Relay Chain. This includes the existential deposit and deposits for proxy/multisig operations.
• Ability to pay transaction fees in certain assets. As in, accounts would not need DOT in order to exist on-chain nor to pay fees.”

Apart from NFTs, this means even CBDCs might be possible on Polkadot. The article also noted that these changes would also be valid for Polkadot’s “canary” network Kusama, where the parachain is called Statemine.

Care for a mint?

As crypto and blockchain use cases expand, there is a definite push to offer users the ability to mint their own assets.

One major blockchain company actively looking into this is Ripple. In November, RippleX General Manager Monica Long spoke about the XLS-20 standard for minting NFTs on the XRP Ledger. However, Long mentioned that validators still need to vote on the same.

What’s more, it’s not just top ten blockchains getting in on the game. Vice President of Products at Coinbase, Sanchan S. Saxena, shared that Coinbase NFT had plans to let users mint NFTs on-chain, while keeping metadata on non-Coinbase servers.

Bidding you luck

At press time, the Polkadot parachain auctions were still going on. Among the remaining contenders, Clover had raised 9.4155 million DOT, while Efinity bagged 8.3648 million DOT.

Other winners so far are Moonbeam, Acala, Astar, and Parallel. The winning parachains are due to be on-boarded by around 18 December.