Non-fungible Tokens Can Work on the XRP Ledger, Proposed by XRPL Labs’ Founder

Founder of XRPL Labs-Wietse Wind-proposed on GitHub that the NFTs (non-fungible tokens) can be supported by the XRPL (XRP Ledger) without any change being done to XRP Ledger code.

Firstly, Wietse Wind elaborated on the difference between NFTs and XRP tokens.

He said a non-fungible token is a certain type of cryptographic token that represents something unique, as a non-fungible token (NFT) can not be mutually interchanged. According to Wind, an NFT’s non-mutual-interchangeability makes it unique from other native tokens like XRP; that can be sent or received by a user without the need of the token (XRP) being uniquely identified.

In simple words, Wind differentiated the two (native tokens and NFTs) as divisible and indivisible, as he stated that XRP’s are divisible like, for instance, a single XRP token can be divide into two or more proportions i.e. one can receive or send 0.75, 0.50 or 0.25 XRP. Wind said, on the opposite, it is impossible with an NFT as it is entirely indivisible which means one single NFT will always be treated or traded as one single unique NFT.

Wietse Wind illustrated some of the use cases of NFTs as he pronounced that the NFTs are used to create verifiable digital scarcity, digital ownership, and also the probability of “asset interoperability across multiple platforms”.

Further, Wind said that the non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are also used in certain sorts of applications that require digital items like crypto art and digital collectibles.

Wietse Wind also elucidated his idea in the following manner:

“The XRP Ledger has an issued token precision of 15 significant figures. The smallest amount of an issued token the XRPL can handle is 1000000000000000e-96. The decimal value of this scientific notation is:

0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001

0.{80 zeroes}1…

“Let’s assign the last (say) 11 figures to client side / user interface ‘NFT behaviour’…

“if the value of issued currency is in the range of 1000000000000000e-85 – 1000000000000000e-96, clients should handle (represent, mostly a user interface affair) the amount as NFT.“

One of the significant points that Wind put forward in his proposal is that for his “NFT idea” to work there is no change required to the XRP Ledger and a very slight change will be required to the users’ wallet.