Ripple launches $250 million NFT fund
Ripple has announced today the launch of its new NFT fund that is of worth $250 million to study and foster new and innovative use cases for non-fungible tokens.
This fund was revealved as part of its XRPL developer summit and it will be focussed on the development of different use cases of NFTs on the XRP Ledger. This new fund would be used to support developers, marketplaces and brands that are focussed on the NFTs. The NFT industry has gained a lot of following recently and though it started off mainly for the art industry, it has since grown into different use cases for different industries and the technology is stiln nascent. There are a variety of ways in which NFTs can be applied and used for the real world and it is this innovation and the space for growth that Ripple and other businesses are looking to tap into.
The Creator Fund launched by Ripple is done in partnership with NFT marketplaces Mintable and mintNFT which have direct knowledge about the demand for NFTs.
“While NFTs have opened the door for a tokenized future, actually navigating these concepts is a different ball game for many,” said Monica Long, GM of RippleX at Ripple. “By starting with marketplaces and creators, our fund seeks to take the guesswork out of NFT projects to unlock unexplored tokenization use cases on the XRP Ledger.”
The XRP Ledger has not yet been used widely for NFTs as yet but the advantages of using it, like the high speed, low cost and the built-in royalty system should make it a good candidate for the NFT future to be built on it and this is likely to be what Ripple might be planning as well. XRP also has strong library support for NFT integration which removes the need for core development within the XRP Ledger as far as NFTs are concerned.
As is widely know, Ripple is involved in a legal tangle with the SEC to decide on whether XRP should be considered as a security or not and it looks as though this focus on NFTs is likely to turn the attention of the SEC on NFTs as well and it may well choose to decide on whether NFTs are indeed securities and whether they should be made tradable within the US or not. This is something that the crypto industry is waiting for the regulators to action upon and it will be interesting to see what the regulators decide.
