It’s been more than a year since Ducati announced plans to embrace web3 and launch NFT collectibles on the XRP Ledger founded by Ripple. Now the motorcycle brand is launching its first free digital collectibles later this week.
It’s unclear whether the partial legal ruling in favor of Ripple in the United States had any bearing on the timing.
While the XRP Ledger is not the first blockchain you’d think of for NFTs, 1.2 million NFTs were minted between November 2022 and March 2023, according to Ripple. Its highest grossing NFT collection on the XRP Ledger, the XPunks, had a $23,000 sales volume in the past seven days, which would give it a ranking outside the top 300 across all blockchain collections.
The first Ducati collectible launching on July 26 is a video history of Ducati logos on the tanks of motorbikes produced since 1946. Users need to sign up within seven days of the launch date. As with most NFT drops, those who get the first collectible will gain access to subsequent project releases. But there’s little news about what the future holds beyond that.
For the project, Ducati partnered with Web3 Pro, which also has a relationship with another Italian brand, Lamborghini, which owns Ducati. Web3 Pro is a brand engagement and loyalty agency rather than a purely technology focused platform.
While most major automotive brands have already entered the web3 world, drops targeted at the motorcylcing community have been few and far between. Animoca Brands ran an NFT based game for the MotoGP racing series and Yamaha in Thailand dropped a collection in 2021.
