In May, RippleX invited the developer community to provide feedback on our proposal to enhance NFT support on the XRP Ledger (XRPL).

We believe crypto and blockchain are powerful levelers in unlocking access and equity for everyone. The rapid rise and growth of non-fungible tokens – or NFTs – is key to that vision. On track to surpass $17B in global sales by the end of this year, it’s clear that NFTs are here to stay with many in the industry already building toward a tokenized future that allows new business models to prosper and people to engage more deeply with the communities and things they care most about.

Today the NFT-Devnet is available, making it possible for all developers to learn about and experiment with the native NFT capabilities introduced with XLS-20d. Developers are welcome to start building apps and tokenization use cases, as well as visit the Technical Tutorial page to get started.

The NFT-Devnet: Getting Started with NFTs on XRPL

Non-fungible tokens serve to encode ownership of physical, non-physical or purely digital goods, such as works of art and in-game items.

The XLS-20d proposal introduces extensions to the XRP Ledger that would support a native NFT type, along with operations to enumerate, transfer and hold such tokens. With XLS-20d live on XLS-20 Sandbox today, developers can access all essential NFT functionality including minting, trading, and burning. Moreover, advanced features like automatic royalties, which enable more sophisticated royalty structures for creators, and co-ownership, which expands access possibilities to assets, are also built into the proposal.

The NFT-Devnet is a beta environment where developers can preview, test and experiment with XLS-20d on XRPL before it is enabled on the Mainnet.

As this is the first time developers can mint native NFTs on the XRP Ledger, an interactive Technical Tutorial in the documentation on xrpl.org can help them get started. We also encourage developers building NFT projects – or wanting to get started with NFTs – to apply to the XRPL Grants program.

Community Spotlight: Carbonland Trust

RippleX is just one contributor to the XRPL – there’s a whole community of independent developers building on it today for its inherent performance advantages and tokenization capabilities. One such project is Carbonland Trust, which is pushing the boundaries for potential NFT uses.

Earlier this year, Ripple launched the XRPL Grants program – an initiative to engage, fund and support the independent developer community and their technical projects built on the XRP Ledger. Carbonland Trust is one of more than 20 projects to receive funding through the program, focused on protecting forest land with their CO₂ Removal Bonded NFTs and Conservation Certificates. The project centers on creating the first CO₂ Removal Credit Yielding NFT, a carbon credit producing digital asset and forest conservation DeFi protocol. In addition, the project includes CO₂ Bonds which offer businesses and individuals a better way to remove CO₂, hedge against rising carbon credit prices, and lock in a stable, long-term supply of high-quality offsets.

Carbonland Trust is one of many projects funded through the XRPL Grants program that will build on the XRPL XLS-20 Sandbox environment.

Experimenting on the NFT-Devnet

We’re excited to bring our proposal for NFT capabilities to life on the NFT-Devnet, a test network with feature-functionality that will look exactly like the primary Devnet. This is a first step toward our vision of enabling developers to build apps that leverage the XRP Ledger’s native tokenization capabilities.

While the RippleX team is excited to contribute to NFT technology on the XRP Ledger, our engineers–along with others in the community–are also contributing to its stability and scalability. As such, XLS-20d will initially be released on the NFT-Devnet in order to allow developers to test NFT capabilities, and server operators to understand the performance characteristics and implications of the proposed changes without compromising the performance of the XRPL.

Following today’s release, we invite the XRPL developer community to visit the Technical Tutorial page. Feel free to comment and/or ask your questions below.