Revolutionizing NFTs the RMRK way

8 min readSep 30, 2022

Most crypto enthusiasts perceive NFTs simply as standalone jpegs or videos that can be owned and verified on the blockchain. But this is not the case because what they see is just one resource of that NFT, i.e., image resource. Well, it’s not their fault as 99% of NFT collections today are single-resourced NFTs in their most basic form.

NFTs are revolutionary technology, but unfortunately, the NFTs we have today are barely scratching the surface of what they could potentially unlock. But as they say, “Innovation is not happening until it has happened.” The same has happened with NFTs too. Following the NFT craze that saw digital rocks cost millions of dollars, people got bored and started bashing the NFT space due to the limited use cases offered. In steps came RMRK, a project with bleeding edge technology taking NFTs to their fullest potential with its NFT legos, which when combined, can do wonders.

In this article, we will discuss the RMRK NFT Standard and how its NFT legos are revolutionizing the way we use NFTs.

What is RMRK ?

It was 2020, NFTs were hitting the headlines, and the NFT scene was heating up. But there was an issue with Polkadot and Kusama- they did not support smart contracts.

The reason: being relay chains, their intended role is to enable communication among parachains and security of the network. Ideally, this means offloading things like smart contracts to parachains. And since NFTs are nothing but smart contracts, Dotsama was missing out on the NFT season.

This motivated founder of RMRK, Bruno — former technical educator at the Web3 Foundation, to create the NFT Standard for Dotsama, which eventually became the most advanced standard in all Web3. RMRK is a set of NFT legos which, when combined, allows the NFT creators to build a system of infinite complexity. The NFT legos are standalone meaning they can be used individually, and when combined, can create complex systems.

RMRK uses “Colored Coin” technology in which special messages (called Remarks) are sent to the blockchain. These Remarks are very light and can be interpreted by blockchain the same way as smart contracts allowing creators to be much more experimental and innovative. Let’s take a look at the legos one by one.

Nested NFTs

This lego gives NFTs the ability to own other NFTs; giving them a parent-child relationship.

NFTs have the inherent property of ownership. NFTs can be owned by a contract or wallet address, and the ownership can be verified on the blockchain. However, with RMRK Nested NFTs, it is now possible for NFTs to be owned by other NFTs. Simply put, NFTs can be nested or contained inside other NFTs.

Imagine a swordNFT and a manNFT. Traditionally, both of these can be owned by any address. But the nested NFT RMRK lego allows the manNFT to own or contain the swordNFT. This can theoretically be extended to an infinite number of NFTs.

Multi-resource NFTs

The resource is the appearance visible to the viewers. Majority of the NFTs today are single resourced which means they can be either image or videos or pdf. Being a video NFT doesn’t make it multi-resource, as it may still be a single video resource.

RMRK Multi-resource NFT lego allows NFTs to have multiple resources as a part of the main NFT. An NFT can be an image, video, audio, or a pdf, depending on the context it’s being loaded into. Imagine a bookNFT that displays a pdf file on Kindle, plays the audiobook on Spotify, and plays the whole drama when loaded into a video player. Remember, all these resources are a part of the main NFT.

Equippable NFT

The Nested NFT lego allowed an NFT to own a different NFT, with the owner being the parent and the other NFT being the child. Equippable lego allows the parent NFT to equip or unequip its child NFT to gain additional functionality or utility.

Imagine the manNFT being the parent. To equip the swordNFT, the manNFT should first own it. Think about it in real life, to hold a sword in your hand, the sword should literally be in your hands right? The figure below explains it all.

Importantly, for NFT A to equip NFT B, A should first own B. Without nested functionality, true equippability isn’t possible. This ensures the Provable Digital Scarcity of NFTs.

Before we move to other legos, let’s understand these better with a few examples of these legos in different sectors.

1. Disrupting the Music Industry

Imagine a song with 4 verses, and each verse is composed by a different songwriter. Now, the single verseNFTs can be nested inside the main songNFT. And each time the songNFT is traded, all 4 songwriters get royalties for their contribution.

To simplify, imagine an AlbumNFT with 5 songNFTs nested inside it. Now each time albumNFT is traded, all 5 songNFT creators get royalties as well.

This ensures artists get proper credits and their fair share in trustless fashion.

2. Disrupting the Gaming Industry

Imagine your in-game soldierNFT is on a mission to destroy a terrorist camp. Nested NFTs allow the soldierNFT to contain an armorNFT, helmetNFT, and sniperNFT in it.

Equippable lego blocks allow the soldierNFT to equip the owned NFTs to gain additional powers in-game. So when the soldierNFT reaches the camp, he can equip the armor, helmet, and sniper NFTs to kill the enemies. And on defeating them, the soldierNFT can now own and equip enemy weapons too.

On-chain emotes

This lego block makes it possible to react to an NFT. You can react to any RMRK standard NFT with emojis. These reactions work like switches, which means sending a heart emoji twice will remove it.

A common argument to this is: In Opensea also you can like an NFT, what’s the difference ?

The problem with Opensea is that the likes are exclusive to the Opensea platform, and once an NFT is transferred, the likes vanish. But in the case of RMRK NFTs, the unicodes are applied to NFT IDs in a separate record. Therefore, the emojis are forever stuck to the NFT. Whenever you transfer this NFT, the emojis also transfer with it, thus working as an on-chain reputation for NFTs. An NFT with a heart emoji from Gavin Wood would be more valuable since anyone could verify this on the blockchain.

Conditional Rendering

This lego block gives NFTs the ability to change or render its client side output based on certain on-chain or off-chain conditions.

Imagine a plantNFT that keeps drying everyday, but after reacting with 10 water emojis, it will again get green and growing. This can be expanded to any type of interaction. So we can put any condition in code, and once this gets satisfied, the NFT client side output will change.

In the above gaming example, imagine you killed 100 enemies with your sniper, then the sniper will be upgraded to a sniper that releases fireballs now. Think about the possibilities! This opens up room for an infinite amount of innovation for NFTs.

Upgrading Rifle using Conditional Rendering

NFTs as DAO

This allows NFTs to be governed as DAOs by fractionalizing them into fungible tokens after depositing a certain amount of RMRK tokens.

Imagine the most valuable mallNFT in a metaverse. With this RMRK lego, this mallNFT can be fractionalized into fungible tokens and the owners of these fungible tokens will govern the working of the mallNFT. Any revenue generated through this mallNFT could be distributed to the fungible token owners.

Kanaria - the flagship product

Kanaria started as a basic egg NFT to which people could send emotes. The NFT eggs required at least 3 on-chain emotes to hatch, and when hatched, they were rendered based on the types of emotes added. Emotes thus influenced the initial characteristics. Kanaria birds have various child NFT slots that can equip any future whitelisted RMRK standard NFT, thus making them forward compatible, aka future-proof.

Today’s popular NFT projects may die in the future as the hype fades, but Kanaria, with the ability to equip future NFTs with unique utilities, will remain eternally liquid.

In the pipeline

RMRK is soon to launch a truly decentralized Metaverse called Skybreach that will showcase the power RMRK NFT standard. This will be live sometime in 2023.

The land sale started in Q2 2021 and 14800+ land plots have been bought, costing nearly 1 Million RMRK tokens. This amount comprises 10% of total RMRK supply. To learn more about Skybreach Metaverse, click here. If you are interested in land sale analytics, click here.

The RMRK protocol was born in the Kusama blockchain but will not be limited to just Kusama. RMRK team is working dedicatedly on RMRK ‘Substrate Pallets’ and ‘EVM contracts’. Once substrate pallets are live, all substrate based chains like Acala, Astar, Moonbeam will be able to implement the RMRK NFT standard.

With RMRK EVM contracts going live, other EVM chains like ETH, BSC, AVAX, and many more will be able to use the RMRK standard. This is really going to be a paradigm shift for every NFT enthusiast outside Dotsama because since inception, the only NFTs they know are single resourced static jpegs.

I hope this in-depth article helped you understand the RMRK NFT standard and its legos. RMRK is difficult to grasp at first, but once you do, its extremely exciting. RMRK’s first rally, like the DOT’s rally in 2020, was fueled by speculation such as metaverse, land sales. The next cycle, on the other hand, will be driven by integration, utility, partnerships, and actually usable products. It will be fascinating to see how the RMRK NFT standard disrupts major industries such as gaming, ticketing, music, and many more.