Ripple brings NFTs to XRP ledger – Here are all the details

After a year of development and testing, Ripple has finally brought NFTs to the XRP Ledger. Chief Technology Officer David Schwartz informed the community earlier on 1 November that XLS-20, which is the standard for XRPL NFTs, is now enabled on the XRP ledger mainnet.  

This milestone has been achieved thanks to the XRPL community as well as RippleX engineers, who conducted extensive testing and fixed bugs in order to bring digital art to XRPL.

Advantages of NFTs on XRP ledger

This new feature developed by the engineers at RippleX for the XRP Ledger brings a variety of benefits for NFTs.

The NFTs on XRPL are less vulnerable in terms of attacks and bridge hacks since a no-smart-contracts approach was adopted. This works to decrease the congestion as well as bring down the cost when compared to other chains. 

“With XLS-20, developers can support more NFTs at lower cost and do things like leverage auction functionality and an efficient storage mechanism, direct a cut of secondary sales to the original minter on the XRPL, or even co-own NFTs.” the press release said. 

Another feature that will be welcomed by artists and creators, is the standardized royalty enforcement, which is built into the ledger. The automatic royalties will provide artists with a part of the revenue that comes from trading their NFTs. XRPL will also let creators designate a third party who can mint and sell tokens on their behalf. 

Ripple has pitched XLS-20 as the transparent and sustainable future for NFTs, and keeping with that spirit, a vote was conducted to take the temperature of the community for this new feature. Community members pointed out several concerns during the voting process. 

One user pointed out the risk of outages of individual XRP ledger servers due to the increased load on the network, in addition to the increased transaction costs. Another user raised concerns about minting NFTs and converting large collections of NFTs simultaneously.

The road ahead for NFTs on XRP ledger

CTO David Schwartz has hinted at further libraries and enhancements to tokenizing assets on XRPL. For the time being, RippleX engineers will continue to test this new feature, while Ripple will seek collaboration from entities in this space. 

The CTO has encouraged community members to familiarize themselves with this new feature and build applications on XRPL. This plan has been a year in the making. David Schwartz laid out his vision for NFTs on XRPL in November last year.