RMRK is NFT and metaverse project and a bit more. RMRK allows NFT’s to evolve and be freely customized without restrictions. It was started at the end of 2020 after its founder Bruno Škvorc left from Web3 Foundation where he worked on Kusama and Polkadot as a technical educator. Since RMRK was born the team has grown from 4 people to 10 people and they still have two open positions and things are ramping up.
Bruno is not new to the blockchain industry since he started working on Ethereum in 2015. Since then he has trained Web2 developers to move into Web3, worked as a smart contract developer in an Ethereum-based game and wrote a book named “A Developer’s Guide to Ethereum”. Before his jump to the blockchain industry he used to be a web developer.
RMRK made the first NFT marketplace on Polkadot ecosystem, Singular. Singular is not limited to pictures but also supports videos, music, 3D objects and PDF’s. RMRK has functions such as NFT’s owning other NFT’s, NFT’s reacting to emotions, NFT’s used on DAO, conditional rendering and multi-resource NFT’s. I’m going to try and explain these things that make RMRK unique from other projects and how RMRK really in a simple way in this post.
RMRK made the first NFT marketplace on Polkadot ecosystem, Singular.
RMRK has gotten a lot of publicity since it got tweeted by Gavin Wood and since their founder Bruno made his appearance on Kraken’s interview where he said that they broke Kusama twice when they organized popular contests on RMRK such as their top emote competition. In this contest top emoted eggs got secondary artworks to become multi-resource (e.g. having NFT that is eBook and audiobook in one) NFT’s. This resulted in people sending over 300,000 on-chain emotes that KSM couldn’t include them in a block which ended up KSM and Statemine stopping to produce blocks as it couldn’t handle it at the time. This is what Kusama was made for and RMRK is taking everything out of it, even more than anyone else.
Since RMRK operates on top of Kusama none of this from minting NFT’s to complex on-chain emote transactions costs more than a few cents. People don’t need to be afraid to do whatever they can think of on it. On Ethereum this would never happen because people would never pay $500 to interact with their NFTQ. The beauty of Kusama that allows this is the fact that projects are not competing with each other by setting higher and higher fees to get their transaction through before others because of parachains allow them all to be processed simultaneously while being secure, cheap and decentralized.
While RMRK (Remark) can look just like any other NFT and metaverse project out there it’s not. NFT’s on RMRK can natively connect into all existing Kusama parachains that have integrated system.remark extrinsics (piece of information) into their blockchain, which most of the major ones have done. These extrinsics are the reason why RMRK is able to do what it does without smart contracts. Basically RMRK is graffitiing the chain with these extrinsics which has its weird moments until RMRK gets their smart contracts and pallets (more about that later).
So when you are minting an NFT on RMRK you are actually graffitiing the chain by logging/remarking these NFT’s on the block instead of on-chain which makes it so cheap. As this does not add anything to on-chain (Kusama does not allow it without a parachain) it’s a hack to do it without changing the state of Kusama. This also means that the cost of the mint will be relative to the size of the graffiti. Keep in mind that this was originally intended to do like this, which they made working and so far no other project is doing NFT’s in this way. RMRK is the standard of this for Kusama right now.
In real-world this means NFT’s can have their body on RMRK and wear a hat from another parachain project. Combining these two things does not require creating a new NFT and paying an expensive smart contract fee. This hat can also have some utility on it such as allowing you to get collateralized loans at a lower interest on the blockchain that the hat is on.
The team is also working on getting some of these partnerships live such as Karura’s one to make our NFT’s be used as collateral in loans and they have plenty of unannounced partnerships that are under the NDA.
Since NFT’s on RMRK are evolving and they can be always changed at a little cost this lengthens their life span a lot and fixes the issue that we’ve had with NFT 1.0’s that are usually just abandoned after they’ve shipped out because of technological limitations and heavy cost of complex transactions on ETH. This makes sure that your old NFT on RMRK can get into the newest trends just like some people do in the real-life when buying clothes.
RMRK had its first cross-chain collaboration with Unique Network. Unique Network has implemented their logic in their own blockchain which allows this. In this collaboration they made Kanaria (RMRK) and CheloBricks (Unique Network) NFT’s to interact with each other, change their looks and get new applications via upgrades to their NFT’s. Just like in the real world we see designer brands collaborating with each other we might be starting to see different blockchain projects collaborating with each other. This is something that only RMRK and projects integrating its standard can do as of now.
You can see a Kanaria bird with ChaosDAO ape mask with the flag of The Damned Pirates Society below. Three NFT projects and three separate NFT’s in one evolving NFT. This is what the real ultra-personalization and collaborations look like.
RMRK is also the first and only NFT project that allows conditional rendering which means that NFT’s can look different based on certain conditions such as having your NFT’s background having snow when Kusama’s block number hits a certain point for example on December 1st.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_2ap4uftZs
It also changes the look of NFT’s via on-chain emotes if done so. For example your NFT could start laughing if you select “laugh” emoji, wear a sword if “aggressive” emoji is selected or pick up a shield if “scared” emoji is selected. This is also something unique to RMRK.
RMRK — The Dawn of the Art Legos — YouTube
RMRK is currently at 2.0 and their Singular marketplace is currently at 1.0. When their marketplace moves to 2.0 which we should expect in the next months it allows every creator to be able to add all these functions into their NFT’s that are currently on RMRK’s Kanaria collection.
Kanaria collection is the first official collection of RMRK and was made to showcase the possibilities of RMRK and to do their initial collectible offering for the public where 8500 eggs worth 6 million dollars were claimed by participants and in exchange they got fairdropped 89% of the total supply of RMRK. The rest of the tokens are held by the team with 2 years of vesting (5% of the supply) and the rest for market makers and early investors who they did pick very carefully. This is what a community-owned project looks like and is also pretty rare in the current crypto scene.
Another interesting thing is that the token is going to be deflationary and instead of traditional staking we’ll be able to use our RMRK tokens in their upcoming metaverse to stake alongside our Kanaria birds that we’ll be using to mine the materials to be used in crafting new NFT’s that we can use with our Kanaria birds to add new functions and new looks for example which will raise their value. Staking RMRK alongside Kanaria birds will give them a performance boost thus speeding the process to get these new NFT’s.
The token will also be used in DAO as it’s needed to lock up some if we want to fractionalize our NFT’s such as billboards. It’ll be also used when someone wants to mint an NFT on Singular and make it show in discovery pages for better visibility. If you also want to report someone for plagiarism for example you need to stake some RMRK to do the report and in exchange you can get some portion of the reported person’s RMRK for yourself if your claim is deemed as right. Just like NFT’s, you can use RMRK as collateral on DeFi to mind USDT for example or provide liquidity. And of course you are also able to participate in their governance in deciding platform-wide parameters such as commission fees on Singular. I’ve not seen as many utilities for any NFT and metaverse token yet.
RMRK is currently rewriting their logic and adding pallets and smart contracts in their project that allow easier accessibility for developers and all the utilities that smart contracts allow such as bidding and royalties. It will also make the project less chaotic and more professionally suited for mainstream adoption.
There will always be only one token for RMRK, even when they move to Polkadot. They’re planning to have their pallets and smart contracts live on other parachains by the time parachains launch on Polkadot. They are also bringing their own metaverse that’ll be fully finished by 2022 Q4 but playable elements will be shipped before.
There will always be only one token for RMRK, even when they move to Polkadot.
When RMRK has their own pallet in the future to include their own NFT standard in there it allows parachains to adopt that seamlessly into their own unique existing blockchain and get everything that’s on RMRK working in their own blockchain as well. Just like any parachain can adopt Chainlink pallet to integrate Chainlink into their blockchain or Frontier pallet that Parity built with Moonbeam to make their blockchain EVM-compatible, anyone will be able to add RMRK’s pallet to integrate everything on RMRK into their own blockchain. Any parachain can have as many pallets as they want to make their blockchain fully customized. These pallets that are like programs will then write according to their own logic into the blockchain (DOT/KSM) and there is no need for extrinsics (chaos) anymore. These pallets are unique to Dotsama ecosystem. Think them as a plugins made by others to be used by anyone.
Recently a few weeks ago RMRK got a grant from Moonbeam to bring their advanced NFT capabilities to Moonriver. In this collaboration both RMRK’s team and MOVR’s team are making Solidity (Ethereum) standards for RMRK-based Kusama assets. This allows RMRK not only to work with every other parachain but every single EVM chain to work with their NFT structure. Because of bringing smart contracts it makes developers’ and creators’ jobs much easier and is paving a way for more adoption. These contracts are mostly ERC721-compatible so this means that because of ERC-721’s limits not everything can be completely compatible with MOVR and RMRK.
This partnership will be showcased in their collaboration with their metaverse land sale and with Moonsama. This makes Moonsama and Kanaria collections to be able to use an item created by RMRK in both collections and have different resources (outputs) for that item depending on which collection it is worn on. As you can see from the pictures above, pixelated one on Moonsama to fit Moonsama’s look and clearer one on Kanaria to fit Kanaria’s look.
In their metaverse there will be land auctions meaning that we use our RMRK to pay for the land. Since NFT’s can own other NFT’s on RMRK (not possible on Ethereum), we can make our lands own billboards. Since RMRK allows fractionalized NFT’s we can fractionalize that billboard to 10 people and then use our share as a vote in its DAO, that RMRK also allows choosing who and at what price can use the billboard and share the revenue in a decentralized way. This is also something that other projects can’t do in the same way
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMpwGo6wi_0&t=
They’re also building a new UX that’ll be more stable and faster than their existing one. Currently there is not a wallet that can store RMRK except Polkadot js. Since RMRK operates on Kusama’s common good parachain named Statemine which allows them cheap operational costs it’s required that the wallet you store your RMRK in has some KSM deposited in as well which makes it confusing to store your RMRK. This is also the reason why we can’t pay with our RMRK in Singular yet.
Loads of people including me have been wondering why they chose Statemint instead of building their own blockchain and the answer is that they didn’t want to wait until they can deploy their own blockchain and since they don’t really need their own parachain. Statemint is also designed specifically for minting assets such as NFT’s and USDT so it’s a perfect fit due to its low expenses. Right now RMRK is the only token on Statemint that’s tradeable on centralized exchanges.
The good thing is that this will change in the future when Kusama’s council when they vote that you don’t need to use KSM to use Statemine which will make RMRK easy to store and bring one of the most important functionalities (paying with RMRK) to RMRK.
This is what the future looks like and it’s going to be chaotic as we don’t even know all the use cases that RMRK is able to do but the future looks extremely promising for RMRK and it seems like others are not going to catch up with it anytime soon.
