Ripple has announced the second round of grantees for its $250 million Creator Fund. This fund is meant to encourage the development of NFT-related projects on the XRP Ledger.
The second wave of the fund includes the Metaverse platform 9LEVEL9, which will sell tickets to virtual events as NFTs, the fan-focused Japanese NFT marketplace Anifie, the NFT sports platform Capital Block, the XRP NFT marketplace NFT Master, the NFT IP company SYFR Projects, the NFT membership project ThinkingCrypto, and Cross-Metaverse Avatars.
Boris Alergant, who is in charge of DeFi Markets at Ripple, said that the fund, whose first group of participants was announced in April, was made to speed up the XRP NFT economy.
NFTs are unique blockchain tokens that represent ownership and can be linked to a wide range of assets, such as event tickets, digital artwork, and physical goods. Dunn Analytics says that in September, Ethereum was still the most popular blockchain for non-fungible tokens (NFTs). In total, just under $350 million worth of NFTs were traded on the most popular NFT marketplace, OpenSea.
The XRP Ledger (XRPL) is a public, decentralized blockchain that is made to be fast, reliable, and use little energy. It is run by a group of developers from all over the world.
The Ripple Creator Fund and XRP Ledger give artists a fair chance to do well. The founder of SYFR Projects, Sean O’Leary, says that it is up to teams like SYFR Projects, which are deeply involved in the music industry, to use the XRPL to come up with new ideas.
Alergant said that the applications for Ripple’s Creator Fund were reviewed and voted on by a group of community members and people from the XRP Ledger Foundation and Ripple who were not named.
Alergant said, “We are absolutely committed to that $250 million and to seeing that innovation on the blockchain.” But they didn’t say how much each creator would get.
“We tried not to blow it all up in one place,” he said.
Some people may be surprised that Ripple is still giving out all $250 million, even though the bear market is still going on and the number of NFTs is only a small fraction of what it was in Q1 and Q2 of this year. But Alergant thinks that nobody should be worried about the ongoing drop in the crypto market.
“I’ve been in bear markets,” Alergant said. “Ripple has been in a lot of bear markets.”
“The innovation that comes out of these bear markets is because people sit down and come up with these amazing new use cases and things,” he said.
Alergant is very excited about NFTs that are based on XRPL. Alergant thinks that XLS-20, an NFT standard for XRPL, will make experimenting with NFTs “easier” for Web2 developers. XLS-20 is an NFT standard for XRPL.
“Web2 developers can really use the NFT standard and interact with it simply with API calls as opposed to coding on smart contracts,” he said.
At the time this was written, XLS-20 had not yet been added to the XRPL Mainnet. Ripple has gotten about 4,000 Creator Fund applications in total. In the fourth quarter of this year, it plans to announce the third and final round of Creator Fund winners.
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