Ripple to dive into NFTs with The Open Metaverse
These past 12 months have shown that NFTs are here to stay, and that no blockchain (except Bitcoin) can stay in business without developing NFT projects on it.
Even Ripple got it now.
⛓️ Being somewhat of a black ship in the blockchain world, Ripple has been developed and positioned itself as a blockchain for banks, helping them with cross-border payments and settlements. This narrow (and let’s be honest, controversial in the crypto world) objective has always kept Ripple apart, while also downsizing the fact that XRP Ledger is not really decentralized. XRPL uses a variant of Byzantine Fault Tolerant protocol as a consensus ( validator nodes are continually querying each other to calculate a block validation), and while anyone can become a validator, in reality only those on the centrally edited Unique Node List (UNL) are really being solicited.
Another flaw that Ripple is being often accused of is XRP allocation: all 100 billion XRP were pre-mined back in 2013, with 20% going to the founders and 80% – to the Ripple company. Nine years later, Ripple still holds 60%.
Ripple has largely missed the DeFi-NFT-Metaverse movement, sliding from the solid 3rd place in cryptocurrencies market cap list to barely the 8th, but it looks like it is now eager to make up for it.
?️ Yesterday the company announced a collaboration with a New-Zealand based NFT project FLUF World to create “The Open Metaverse” via a new decentralized blockchain called The Root Network. This EVM-compatible PoS blockchain is to be built “alongside” XRPL, although it is not yet clear what “alongside” means. What is known is that XRP will be a default crypto in its “multi-token” gas economy and it will be used to pay transaction fees, while FLUF’s Mycelium will be used as governance and in-game tokens.
? The FLUF World is an ambitious project that started with a collection of fluffy bunnies, then joined by cute spiders (no, not an oxymoron ?), party-loving bears and virtual real estate for them all to live in. FLUF is also associated with AI-enhanced NFTs of the Altered State Machine.
Building a metaverse could be a clever step for bringing Ripple on the web3 map, but by doing so, the company must face its centralization demons.
