Nfts
Interview with Hussein Zangana from XPR Café
At the APEX event in Amsterdam, The Cryptonome interviewed Hussein Zangana, CEO of XPR Café to understand how NFT work on the same register on which the Ripple cryptocurrency is also based.
Here is our interview.
How did the XRP Café project start?
In 2021, there has been a lot of interest in NFTs and that has caught my attention. Some of my friends and I wanted to create an NFT marketplace on XRP Ledger and so we started developing it. There were other marketplaces and we thought we’d start small and see how it went. In a short time, we saw that many community members were turning to us and so we evolved into the XRPL marketplace within a few months.
Since then, I have also organized the infrastructure for XRPL validators, more than 35 validators and I have also helped to engage the community, but also to build it, even outside of our Café, by organizing meetups and developing 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 features 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 type of top-down approach. I think there are some features that are very, very good, not only for XRP Café, but also for how we use XRP Ledger technology on our platform. It’s inexpensive, it’s fast. Royalties are in place on XRP Ledger, so creators will always get paid. And we are looking to complete the full setup of UI features.
How do you support creators and collectors? For example, what tools or resources do you offer? And perhaps help with marketing or creating 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, all creators and artists marketing assistance, metadata creation, artwork assistance if needed, community building, and also marketing with introduction to the community to give them good access.
This is something 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 don’t directly benefit from it, but people will always remember us.
What do you think in general about NFTs and the current market?
This is not a good time for NFTs. I think things happen in cycles. I am sure that the NFT cycle will happen perhaps after the MemeCoin cycle or in parallel with it, perhaps towards the end of this cycle. We will see even more hype and speculation about NFTs. I’m convinced. I can not wait to see that.
We can’t just follow these hype cycles every 4 years, watch the hype and then 3 or 4 years later there’s nothing left. We want to expand it and integrate it with a top-down approach, with real activities, affiliate programs, etc., because we want to do more. On the other hand, the Asian region has enormous growth potential.
Can you give us some data on the platforms like artists, users or countries? As you said, Japan is the biggest country…
Recently, we surpassed around 2.5 million user-signed transactions on Ledger XRP, a great achievement for us.
There is a lot of traffic on XRPL. On average, we receive between 50,000 and 80,000 visitors per day. 60 to 70% of them come from Japan.
We have over 300 collections, I think 400 to 500 collections, and we have a growing number of users in terms of daily transactions, which is about 200 to 300 people making sales daily. These are daily sales, which is really fantastic. The unique active wallets have, on a monthly basis, 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 is making more transactions compared to Ethereum, which makes sense because gas costs are higher, etc.
And what about security? What measures have you put in place in terms of security and you also mentioned royalties. A while ago there was a scandal on OpenSea regarding these fees…
Let’s start with prevention. We check 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 see that it has never been minted before.
It is also possible to follow and monitor their social networks, if they are regular, then check them on our platform. And there’s actually a report on the page where users can report issues.
When it comes to security, the best choice is Ledger XRP, and it’s really amazing: NFTs are not smart contracts, but are built into the protocol itself. So when an NFT is created, it is actually created 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 with things that can’t be changed, but also smart contract exploits, or anything like that, that can be changed later.
So, it not only reduces the complexity because you don’t need to know a lot. You don’t need to be an expert in security, smart contracts or anything. Just knowing if this NFT was created? If it was, the XRP ledger as a blockchain ensures that it can’t be changed anymore. So we inherit these security features from XRP with our third-party verification.
What are you working on? Any news? What is the roadmap for XRP Café?
Yes, absolutely. Regarding our roadmap, we have completed the automated launchpad. 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 on XRPL projects, such as Caillou Labs. We are also working with a high-level protocol. Only the owner can see the metadata, because he can decrypt it. This way, it is possible to insert very sensitive data on the blockchain without others seeing it.
This opens up many use cases that we want to talk about, like decentralized science, which is very important in France and Paris, and we are working with the ex-RPA Commons to bring more attention to this sector. But also anything that requires a decentralized identity, these are things that can be done with this system. That’s something we’re looking at.