Ripple Reveals Final Recipients of $250 Million NFT Creator Fund

Ripple has announced the second wave of recipients selected to join the $250 million Creation fund focused on promoting the development of NFT-related projects on the XRP Ledger.

Joining the fund’s second wave are metaverse platform 9LEVEL9, which will sell tickets to virtual events such as NFTs, fan-focused Japanese NFT marketplace Anifie, NFT sports platform Capital Block, XRP NFT marketplace NFT Master, NFT IP company SYFR Projects, NFT member project ThinkingCrypto, and Cross-Metaverse Avatars.

This was told by Ripple’s head of DeFi Markets, Boris Alergant Decrypt in an interview that the fund, whose first wave of participants was revealed in Aprilwas created to accelerate XRP’s NFT economy.

NFTs are unique blockchain tokens that signify ownership – and can be connected to a wide variety of different assets, from event tickets to digital art to physical goods. Ethereum remains the most popular blockchain for NFTs today and so just below 350 million dollars in total volume traded in September on the leading NFT marketplace OpenSea, according to Dune Analytics.

The XRP Ledger (XRPL) is a decentralized, public blockchain led by a global community of developers, designed to be fast, energy efficient and reliable.

“The Ripple Creator Fund and XRP Ledger level the playing field for artists. It’s up to teams like SYFR Projects who are in the music industry to innovate to take advantage of the opportunities of XRPL, said Sean O’Leary, founder of SYFR Projects, in a statement.

Alergant said Ripple’s Creator Fund applications were judged and voted on by a group that includes representatives from the XRP Ledger Foundation and Ripple as well as unspecified community members.

“We are definitely committed to the $250 million and to seeing that innovation on the ledger,” Alergant said, but did not specify how much each creator would receive.

“We tried not to blow everything in one place,” he said.

It may come as a surprise to some that Ripple still allocates all of the $250 million despite this ongoing bear market, where NFT volume has fallen to just a fraction of what it was in Q1 and Q2 this year. But Alergant doesn’t think anyone should be afraid of the ongoing crypto downturn.

“I’ve seen bear markets. Ripple has seen, you know, a ton of bear markets,” Alergant said.

“The innovation that comes out during these bear markets — that’s really when people sit down and build and these interesting new use cases and amazing things come out,” he recalled.

Alergant is particularly excited about XRPL-based NFTs. Developers have created an NFT standard for XRPL called XLS-20which Alergant believes will make the experience “more accessible” for Web2 developers dealing with NFTs.

“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 of writing, XLS-20 is not yet implemented on the XRPL Mainnet.

Ripple has received approximately 4,000 applications for its creator fund in total. It plans to announce its third and final wave of Creator Fund recipients sometime in the fourth quarter of this year.