Kanaria: RMRK's Initial Collectible Offering

Since RMRK.app started in October of last year, things have been moving very slowly.

I had been passionate about NFTs, but more passionate about my job, and as such could not focus on RMRK as much as it deserved.

Luckily, eager and determined teams stepped up and developed amazing things around the RMRK standard.

Kodadot were the first to create a UI around it and it was a birthing place to many amazing pieces.

EverdreamSoft's gallery was next. Despite still being alpha, it's already very useful for browsing and basic interactions with NFTs.

But as inspiring as these two UIs are, they have other plans that extend beyond the specificity of adding custom logic to Kusama and perfecting the NFT ecosystem across connected and sister networks.

RMRK needs its own dedicated steward. It's own team.

The RMRK Team

As you can see on our now slightly more up to date RMRK website, the team has grown from one to four.

For the past month or so, three excellent developers have joined the cause, with the plan to transition to full time RMRK work in the coming months. During the past few weeks we've been burning the midnight oil, planning for a very long roadmap ahead and developing strategies around RMRK's self-sustainability and evolution on Kusama and in parallel with it. I will continue to work on RMRK full time.

The goal is to have RMRK be a completely separate and detached project with Kusama's excellence and extensibility in mind and several new efforts are already under way. From RMRK2.0 with conditional rendering and nested NFT ownership (more info on both soon) to dedicated open source launchpads and marketplaces that let you launch your NFT sales on Kusama, the RMRK team is dedicated to nothing short of excellence in code, curiosity, and execution.

That said, a full time team to work on an open source standard and set of platforms takes funding. Thus, it is with great pride that we present the fruit of our nightly stupors: Kanaria.

Kanaria

Kanaria is the first official limited-edition collection of functional NFTs on Kusama.

We're using it as a means to bootstrap RMRK's operation without giving away the team's independence to VCs. There is no legal entity behind RMRK, and there's no fiat changing hands. When you claim a Kanaria egg, you're not investing - you're grabbing a piece of history. One of the first NFTs on Kusama, and the very first official collection that kick-started an entire ecosystem.

So what is Kanaria exactly?

Kanaria is a "game" over two main phases: Tamago and Tori, culminating with the Hou-Ou phase.

During the Tamago 1 and 2 phases, KSM holders can claim one or several Kanaria eggs. Only 9999 genesis-edition eggs in four different rarity categories will ever be minted. Owners and other KSM holders can EMOTE on the eggs - send emoticons. This is functionality built into the RMRK standard, so any UI supports it (though Kodadot limits the emoji you can use, so you'll want to use the official Kanaria site to do so).

Note, future series of eggs and birds will likely exist, launched by either the RMRK team or other teams wanting to use our framework. However, only this genesis collection will have permanent for-life traits that give their owners platform-wide bonuses for the duration of a bird's life.

After a successful period of Discovery and gauging of community interest, Tamago 1 is over now, and our public announcement marks the start of Tamago 2.

After an elapsed time, the Tori phase begins and the eggs will become hatchable. Owners must execute the hatch function (CONSUME - i.e. "burning" the egg NFT), otherwise their bird dies and the egg is forfeit. If this happens, the total supply decreases, and with it, valuable and scarce attributes - special abilities - can disappear. After an incubation phase, the eggs will turn into bird NFTs: Canaries (Kanaria is Canaries in Japanese) on May 13th.

The Hou-Ou phase marks the end of the Tori phase when all the unhatched birds will die and forever disappear, and the hatched ones are reborn into their owners' accounts.

The exact mechanics of emoting and hatching will be described on the Kanaria website, but the short version is that you'll need a certain number of a certain type of EMOTEs on your egg for it to be able to hatch, and different combinations of EMOTEs will affect the look and attributes of your bird, but we won't reveal in what way.

The kicker is that these birds are not just pretty to look at. They will be functional NFTs, carrying with them a set of both cosmetic and functional traits. Cosmetic traits might be things like feather color or accessories like sunglasses, while functional traits can entitle you to anything from a percentage of all future RMRK revenue for life, to discounts on various RMRK platforms we'll be launching in the near future both on Kusama and off it.

Pre-claim

45 founder eggs, 450 rare eggs, and 4500 limited edition eggs have been put aside for the pre-claim period. The Super Founder eggs have already been distributed to our earliest supporters.

Tamago 2 will last until April 4th or while pre-claim supplies last, and is a manual process - more info here. On April 4th we'll open the egg claiming process to everyone, with no per-account limits. For more information on times, availability and more, please visit the Kanaria website. We're sure you have questions - we did our best to answer the most common ones in the FAQ.

The ultimate plan is to use this initial offering of collectibles to bootstrap the team, achieve independence, and produce the best multi-chain NFT suite the world has ever seen. We hope you'll join us on our journey!