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Today, XPUNKS, the project credited with kickstarting the XRP NFT craze in 2021 announced its departure from the XRPL, aiming instead for the greener pastures of Solana. A video released by XPUNKS, showing the XRPL logo rhythmically fading away followed by ecstatic music and a Solana logo revealing itself, makes it quite clear that XPUNKS has set its sights on Solana.
XPUNKS may very well be the biggest NFT project you’ve never heard of. Gaining significant notoriety in 2021 by releasing an IOU token on the XRPL and front-running the release of its upcoming NFT amendment, XPUNKS not only invented tokenized whitelisting but also achieved a whopping $100 million market cap at its ATH and is still responsible for over 35% of all NFT related volume on Ripple. In the two years that followed, XPUNKS remained a staple of XRP NFTs.
The project has often described itself as a project without predefined utility that just likes to build cool stuff. Since its inception, XPUNKS has kept itself busy with a variety of different projects and marketing actions. Recently, they became the first full generative collection to reach the surface of the actual moon, hitching a ride on the IM-1 mission, for example. XPUNKS also runs the largest XRP NFT marketplace, which is currently expanding to Cosmos under the name bidds and is building a gaming metaverse called Eden: Discovery.
Although the move to Solana may seem sudden to some, those that have been following the project more attentively could have seen this coming. One can point to suffocating ecosystem politics, hostile behavior towards NFT projects by RippleX and a general lack of interest towards XRP NFTs by the wider crypto community. However, what seems most likely is that XPUNKS is simply looking for a more mature NFT/degen culture which Solana is rife with.
Much is yet to be revealed as to what XPUNKS is planning to do in order to gain traction on Solana after the bridge goes live. But knowing the team and their track record, this move and their action plan has most likely been in the making for a long time. Whether you are planning to grab one or not, it will definitely not be boring to keep an eye on what this project has planned.