Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are now live on the XRP Ledger (XRPL) after a new amendment enabling extensions supporting a native NFT type on the ledger was activated.
David Schwartz, Ripple’s chief technology officer, says in a new blog post that RippleX engineers built the new feature using a no-smart-contracts approach to increase its cost-effectiveness and resilience to hacks.
“XRP Ledger NFTs were also designed with efficiency in mind. Significant transaction expenses are a fundamental problem for developers minting NFTs on leading layer-1 blockchain solutions. Gas fees alone on some chains can add hundreds of dollars to the final price of an NFT and vary based on a given network’s user traffic and congestion.
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.”
Schwartz notes that a few NFTs have already been minted on the XRPL. The CTO says NFTs on the ledger are built with automatic royalties.
“For creators, NFT transfer fees provide them a share of the revenue when the NFT is bought and sold. They can also designate a third party who mints and sells the tokens on their behalf. With on-ledger NFTs, the XRP Ledger is an attractive destination for developers to build new NFT applications that support minting, burning and trading at scale.”
The amendment was first set to pass in September but got delayed after an engineering problem was discovered by a third party hours before it was set to be activated.
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