NFTs
Interview with Hussein Zangana from XPR Cafe
During the APEX event in Amsterdam, The Cryptonomist interviewed Hussein Zangana, CEO of XPR Café to understand how NFTs work in the same ledger wherein Ripple cryptocurrency is also based.
Here is our interview.
How did the XRP Café project start?
In 2021, there was a lot of attention on NFTs and it caught my attention. Together with some of my friends, we wanted to create an NFT marketplace on the XRP Ledger and so we started developing it. There were other marketplaces and we thought we would start small and see how it went. Soon, we saw that many members of the community were turning to us and so we evolved in a few months to the XRPL marketplace.
Since then, I have also organized the infrastructure for XRPL validators, more than 35 validators and also contributed to engaging the community, but also to building the community, even outside of our Café, holding meetups and developing other projects and businesses on XRPL. In regions like Japan, we have made rapid progress.
How does your marketplace differ in terms of functionality and user experience compared to other platforms?
We see a huge growth opportunity to integrate the two segments. This is our long-term vision for this kind of top-down approach. I believe some features are very, very good, not only for XRP Café, but also for how we use XRP Ledger technology on our platform. It’s low cost, it’s fast. Royalties are in effect on the XRP Ledger, so creators will always get paid. And we intend to complete all the configuration of the user interface features.
How do you support creators and collectors? For example, what tools or resources do you offer? And perhaps you help with marketing or setting up NFT sales?
Yes, absolutely, great question. We have a feature called Automatic Launchpad, where people can automatically launch their collection with a minimal page and customize it to their liking. It’s an automatic process. But we also offer, of course, assistance to all creators and artists with marketing, creating metadata, helping with artwork if needed, community building, and also marketing with introducing them to the community to give them good access.
That’s something we’ve been working on a lot. But we also try to be a platform that allows creators to meet other creators and collaborate on interesting things. We don’t benefit directly from that, but people will always remember us.
What do you think about NFTs and the current market in general?
It’s not a good time for NFTs. I think things happen in cycles. I’m sure the NFT cycle will happen maybe after the MemeCoin cycle or in parallel to it, maybe at the end of this cycle. We’ll see even more hype and speculation about NFTs. I’m convinced of that. I can’t wait to see.
We can’t just follow these hype cycles every 4 years, watching the hype and then 3 or 4 years later there’s nothing left. We want to expand 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 about platforms like artists, users or countries? As you said, Japan is the largest country…
We recently surpassed approximately 2.5 million transactions signed by users on Ledger XRP, a huge 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 think 400-500 collections, and we have a growing number of users in terms of daily transactions, so about 200-300 people doing sales daily. That’s daily sales, which is really fantastic. The unique active wallets, on a monthly basis, are 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.
What about security? What measures have you implemented in terms of security and you also mentioned royalties. There was a scandal at OpenSea a while back about these fees…
Let’s start with prevention. We verify the collectors who tell us they are the artists and this is their address. We sign a transaction and verify that they are the creators of this collection. And that collection on the blockchain, we can see that it has not been minted before.
It is possible to track and monitor their social media too if they are regular and then check them on our platform. And there is a report, in fact, on the page where users can report problems.
In terms of security, the best choice is the XRP Ledger, and it is truly amazing: NFTs are not smart contracts, but are integrated into the protocol itself. Therefore, when an NFT is minted, it is actually minted on 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 can’t be modified, but also for smart contract exploits, or anything else like that, that can be modified later.
So it not only reduces complexity, because there is no need to know much. You don’t need to be an expert in security, smart contracts or anything else. You just need to know if this NFT was minted? If so, the XRP ledger as a blockchain ensures that it cannot be modified anymore. So we inherit these security features from XRP with our third-party verification.
What are you working on? Do you have any updates? What is the roadmap for XRP Café?
Yes absolutely. Regarding our roadmap, we have completed the automated launch pad. We want to introduce other features, such as a more sophisticated auction mechanism, and we also integrate social logins, which make it easier to use. We are also working with XRPL projects such as Caillou labs. We are also working with a high-level protocol. Only the owner can see the metadata as they can decrypt it. This way, it is possible to insert very sensitive data into the blockchain without other people seeing it.
This unlocks a lot of use cases we want to talk about, like decentralized science, which is very important in France and Paris, and we are working with the former RPA Commons to improve attention to this sector. But also anything else that requires a decentralized identity, those are things that can be achieved with this system. This is an aspect we are examining.