During the APEX event in Amsterdam, The Cryptonomist interviewed Hussein Zangana, CEO of XPR Cafe to understand how NFTs work on the same ledger on which the cryptocurrency of Ripple is also based.
Here is our interview.
How did the XRP Café project start?
In 2021, there was a lot of attention for NFTs and this caught my attention. Together with some of my friends, we wanted to create an NFT marketplace on XRP Ledger and so we started developing it. There were other marketplaces and we thought of starting slowly and seeing how it went. In a short time, we saw that many community members were turning to us and so we evolved within a few months for the XRPL market.
Since then, I have also organized the infrastructure for XRPL validators, over 35 validators and I have also contributed to engaging the community, but also to building the community, even outside our Café, by holding meetups and growing other projects and businesses on XRPL. In regions like Japan, we have made rapid progress.
What are the differences between your marketplace in terms of functionality and user experience compared to other platforms?
We see a huge growth opportunity to integrate both segments. This is our long-term vision for this type of top-down approach. I believe that some features are very, very good, not only for XRP Café, but also the way we use XRP Ledger technology on our platform. It is low cost, it is fast. Royalties are in place on XRP Ledger, so creators will always be paid. And we are looking to complete the entire user interface feature setup.
How do you support creators and collectors? For example, what tools or resources do you offer? And maybe do you help with marketing or creating NFT sales?
Yes, absolutely, great question. We have a feature called Automatic Launchpad, with which people can automatically launch their collection with a minimal page and customize it to their liking. It is an automatic process. But we also offer, of course, to all creators and artists assistance with commercialization, metadata creation, help with artwork if needed, community building, and also marketing with presentation to the community to give them good access.
This is an aspect we deal with a lot. But we also try to be a platform that allows creators to meet other creators to collaborate on interesting things. We do not derive a direct benefit from it, but people will always remember us.
What do you think in general about NFTs and the current market?
It is not a good time for the NFT. I think things go in cycles. I am quite sure that the NFT cycle will occur perhaps after the MemeCoin cycle or in parallel with it, maybe towards the end of this cycle. We will see even more hype and speculation about the NFT. I am convinced of it. I can’t wait to see it.
We cannot simply follow these hype cycles every 4 years, watching the hype and then 3 or 4 years later there is nothing left. We want to expand it and integrate it with a top-down approach, with real activities, affiliate programs, and so on, because we want to do more. On the other hand, the Asian region has enormous growth potential.
Can you give us some data on platforms like artists, users, or countries? As you said, Japan is the largest country…
Recently we have surpassed approximately 2.5 million transactions signed by users on the Ledger XRP, a great achievement for us.
There is a lot of traffic on XRPL. On average, we have between 50,000 and 80,000 visitors per day. 60-70% of them come from Japan.
We have over 300 collections, I believe 400-500 collections, and we have a growing number of users in terms of daily transactions, that is about 200-300 people making daily sales. These are daily sales, which is really fantastic. The unique active wallets, on a monthly basis, have between 2,000 and 3,000 users.
This puts us at the bottom of the list compared to OpenSea, which has a list of 20,000 or 30,000 unique active wallets making a transaction. But we can see that on XRPL each wallet makes more transactions compared to Ethereum, which makes sense, because gas costs are higher, etc.
And what about security? What measures have you implemented in terms of security and you also mentioned royalties. Some time ago there was a scandal on OpenSea regarding these fees…
Let’s start with prevention. We check the collectors who tell us they are the artists and that this is their address. We sign a transaction and see that they are the creators of this collection. And this collection on the blockchain, we can see that it has not been minted before.
It is possible to track and monitor their social media as well, if they are regular, and then verify them on our platform. And there is a report, in fact, on the page where users can report issues.
Regarding security, the best choice is Ledger XRP, and it is truly incredible: NFTs are not smart contracts, but are built into the protocol itself. So, when an NFT is minted, it is actually minted on the layer 1 of the blockchain.
There is no need for a smart contract and it cannot be changed, it is immutable forever. This is very, very important and helps us for things that cannot be modified, but also for smart contract exploits, or anything else like that, which can be modified later.
Thus, it reduces not only the complexity, because there is no need to know much. It is not necessary to be an expert in security, smart contract or anything else. Just know if this NFT has been minted? If so, the XRP ledger as a blockchain ensures that it can no longer be modified. So we inherit these security features from XRP with our third-party verification.
What are you working on? Do you have any news? What is the roadmap for XRP Café?
Yes, absolutely. Regarding our roadmap, we have completed the automated launch platform. We want to introduce other features, such as a more sophisticated auction mechanism, and we have also integrated social logins, which make it easier to use. We are also working with XRPL projects, such as the Caillou labs. We are also working with a high-level protocol. Only the owner can see the metadata, because they can decrypt it. This way, it is possible to insert very sensitive data on the blockchain without others seeing it.
This unlocks many use cases we want to talk about, such as decentralized science, which is very important in France and Paris, and we are working with the ex-RPA Commons to improve attention to this sector. But also anything else that requires a decentralized identity, these are things that can be achieved with this system. It is an aspect we are examining.
