Ripple announces $250 million fund to support NFT projects on XRP Ledger

Ripple wants to bring the NFT hype to the XRP Ledger. The company announced Wednesday a "creator fund" worth $250 million to support non-fungible token (NFT) projects building on the XRP Ledger.

Ripple said it will provide NFT artists and marketplaces with financial, creative, and technical support. To that end, the company has partnered with creative agency VSA Partners and NFT marketplaces mintNFT and Mintable (in which Ripple is an investor, along with Mark Cuban and others).

Minting NFTs on the XRP Ledger will be a cost-efficient process and drive utility through use cases such as "interactive experiences and fractional ownership," said Ripple. The blockchain also has an in-built decentralized exchange where users can trade tokens for XRP or each other, said the company.

Currently, Ethereum is the leading blockchain for minting NFTs. However, Ripple's general manager Monica Long, believes that the XRP Ledger has the potential to take off as the "next big chain" for NFTs like Solana.

"The XRP Ledger was built to support the tokenization of assets as well as decentralized trading — making it an ideal building block to bring functional, utility-based NFT use cases to life," Long told The Block. "Beyond the XRPL's built-in DEX, it has other native such as escrow that make the fractionalization of NFTs highly accessible."

Ripple's creator fund is denominated in both dollars and XRP, meaning the company has "flexible payment options for creator applicants," said Long.

Organizations rewarding crypto projects building on their native blockchains has become a common trend, as The Block reported recently. In recent months, Ethereum challengers, including Avalanche and Terra, have rolled out rewards programs to attract decentralized finance (DeFi) projects on their blockchains. Often these challengers set aside funds in their native tokens.

This story has been updated with comments from Ripple's general manager Monica Long.