RMRK’s $6M Funding To Develop NFTs With Utility for Polkadot and Kusama Ecosystem

Letters RMRK wavy and in bright prinkZUG, Switzerland–RMRK, an advanced NFT protocol project, announced today that it raised 6 million USD to build the standard cross-chain NFT infrastructure in the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem. Investors such as D1 Ventures, YBB, PAKA, DFG, and others are all betting on NFTs 2.0 as presented by RMRK.

“NFTs right now are digital-dust-gathering assets, mainly overpriced digital pictures that you keep in your digital wallet until the next NFT hype wave hits.” says Bruno Škvorc, project founder and Web3 Foundation alum. “We believe that they’re meant for much more than that. NFTs can have long lasting liquidity by being upgradable, nestable within other NFTs, by being able to react to people reacting to them with emotes, and by being democratically governed through fractional ownership!”

By launching a gamified “initial collectible offering” called Kanaria on Kusama even without smart contracts, the RMRK team has pioneered the NFT-crowdfunding approach which netted them a total of 2 million USD in limited edition egg-nft sales. All egg buyers will also be entitled to a fairdrop of the coming $RMRK token. The remaining 4 million were raised directly from investors based on the vision of NFTs 2.0.

NFTs 2.0

RMRK is developing new standards to expand what NFTs can do:

● NFTs that can own other NFTs

● NFTs that can listen to commands or issue them to their children

● NFTs as DAOs that can, through fractional ownership, be controlled by a group

● NFTs that can react to emotion with conditional rendering logic (send 50 rocket emoji to a picture of a moon, and it can show you a moonbase)

● NFTs that can have multiple resources at once (mint an e-book with an audio version, a PDF file, and a high resolution cover – the environment it’s loaded in decides which part to load automatically).

With these “art legos” in place, RMRK has created an NFT operating system that makes possible NFT projects of arbitrary complexity.

Powerful Partnerships

This potential of art legos was recognized by key players in the Kusama and Polkadot ecosystem, as documented on RMRK’s official blog. Rather than crowd the already crowded parachain space, RMRK has opted to add their technology to other chains instead – the project’s very first runtime-based deployment will be with Unique Network, a dedicated NFT parachain project in the Kusama and Polkadot ecosystem.

With RMRK’s logic coming into the runtime functionality of several partner chains, the RMRK standards for NFTs 2.0 are poised to become the first shared-runtime environment in the Polkadot ecosystem, allowing for seamless teleportation of non fungible assets to and from any supported chain, natively, and at almost zero cost.

You can learn more about RMRK at rmrk.app, and you can play around with their official minting and trading UI for NFTs called Singular on singular.rmrk.app.