Today, we’re excited to announce our investment in Mintable, an NFT marketplace that allows users to seamlessly create, buy, and sell digital items using fiat or cryptocurrency.
As tokenization launches into the mainstream, we believe the ability to digitally sign an asset, sell it on a blockchain, and receive real income from its subsequent sales will create the tipping point for widespread crypto adoption. In 2020 alone, consumers spent $54 billion on non-fungible tokens (NFTs)–and this is only the beginning. NFTs have the long-term potential to accelerate the creator economy, inspire new business models and open access to broader participation in the modern financial system. The growth and development of NFTs will start with marketplaces building upon Layer-1 protocols to support these transactions at scale, but high platform fees act as a barrier to further accessibility and monetization.
Everyone, everywhere should be able to mint, sell, buy, or transfer NFTs on the blockchain of their choice—but making this a reality requires building a multi-chain future: where each blockchain network is optimized for a specific use case to provide developers with more flexibility. This shift will inevitably inspire cross-chain interoperability that allows the right chain to be used at the right time to create the best user experience.
That is why we are so excited about consumer marketplaces like Mintable, which today announced $13 million in Series A funding to expand its platform support for more blockchains. CEO and founder Zach Burks is on a mission to unlock mass consumer adoption of NFTs with an intuitive NFT marketplace that abstracts the underlying complexity of blockchain and minted 700,000 items in the past year.
The XRP Ledger (XRPL)—with its innate performance advantages and built-in decentralized exchange (DEX)—is ideally suited to deliver a seamless experience for NFTs. In order to reach the next stage of growth, Mintable plans to integrate with the XRPL so creators can securely, sustainably and efficiently sell their works. This is also true for users who wish to purchase NFTs and resell them. The Federated Consensus algorithm – core to the design of XRPL – ensures low-cost transactions and positive implications for sustainability. By being able to cut transaction (“gas”) fees down to $0.0004 on XRPL, Mintable recognizes the opportunity to offer a differentiated user experience that provides a competitive advantage in comparison to other marketplaces. In fact, the XRPL consumes only about 790,000 KWh per year and is already carbon neutral, which is far more efficient than proof-of-work networks that consume around 66 TWh of energy per year. In a nutshell, its environmentally friendly attributes will allow billions of NFTs to be minted, bought and transferred on the XRPL in a sustainable way.
We couldn’t be more excited to work with our friends at Mintable to provide creators and developers with a best-in-class experience and bring more participants into the blockchain ecosystem with NFTs. To learn more about Mintable, visit https://mintable.app/ or follow on Twitter @mintable_app.
Interested in learning about enhanced NFT support on the XRP Ledger or integrating your NFT project? Connect with us on Twitter @RippleXDev.