Ripple’s developer arm announces XRPL grants focused on NFT development

RippleX, Ripple’s developer arm, has announced its first wave of XRPL grants to promote its development. The grant offers to fund developers building XRP ledger-based projects. The focus of the latest grants was on the development of non-fungible tokens [NFTs]. According to a statement, RippleX chose 25 applicants from 10 countries and awarded them $2 million.

In a blog, the developers elaborated,

“In this wave, more than 100 grant proposals were submitted, and from this incredible batch of applicants, 25 grantees have been awarded nearly $2 million in total value. Among the grantees are individual developers and teams from more than 10 countries around the world.”

Out of the selected few, three were part of Ripple’s University Blockchain Research Initiative.

Interestingly, this is not the first time Ripple has focused on NFTs. It had long realized the potential of NFTs and has been working to get them on the XRP ledger.

In May, RippleX proposed additional functionality to offer enhanced NFT support on the XRPL. The team also highlighted that XRPL could encourage developers to run more sustainable NFT apps and marketplaces.

For many, minting NFTs implies significant costs. However, according to RippleX, XRPL could ease it, with the team noting,

“Thankfully, the XRP Ledger was built to be a more cost-efficient, scalable blockchain and its coming federated sidechains aim to prevent the potential risk of clogging the network as NFT transactions take off.”

Meanwhile, to promote sustainability, XRPL’s consensus process for validating transactions can be helpful. As per the team, it consumes negligible amounts of energy and is 120,000x more efficient than proof-of-work networks.

While the alleged negative impact of Bitcoin mining has been highlighted far and wide over the past few years, a concerted effort has been made to make mining more environmental-friendly. Therefore, Ripple’s push to promote its ledger over PoW and PoS is also to beat the competition.

However, Bitcoin and Ethereum continue to be among the leading cryptocurrencies in the world.

Nevertheless, Ripple CTO David Schwartz believes that XRPL will deliver a unique combination of the low cost, high speed, and good payments features needed to streamline NFT creation at scale.

In particular, Schwartz had also highlighted the shortcomings of Ethereum blockchain and Binance Smart Chain in maintaining consistent transaction fees. As transaction fees have remained a pain point for buyers and sellers, Ripple’s move to tackle these issues could place XRPL in an advantageous position.

However, this is all theory and the competition will be proved once XRPL announces the first NFT.