RMRK is coming to Moonriver

As was recently announced, RMRK is coming to Moonriver via a grant. Let's explain what this means.

The Grant

The grant has a duration of 6 months with one milestone every two months. These are:

1. Multi-resource NFTs, and nested NFTs, plus a UI to test these.
2. Emotes and conditional rendering, plus equip mechanics for nested NFTs, plus a UI to test these.
3. Fractionalization and full integration of all features into Singular.

The NFT contracts will be mostly ERC721-compatible, but due to ERC721's inherent limitations, we cannot achieve complete compatibility (e.g. some events and other nitpicks which will be fully documented).

Implications and Performance

You may remember me saying in more than a few podcasts that RMRK can't economically work on an EVM machine. This remains true.

Because every EVM standard is basically just a hack on how to interpret custom data on chain, and with NFTs this data is mostly strings which are notoriously expensive to store, every operation with an NFT is expensive by default.

This is why pallets in Substrate chains have an unparalleled advantage - their data structures can be optimized to store the data we need in exactly the way we need.

However, due to the popularity of the RMRK standards and their incredible usefulness when compared to anything else out there, and Moonriver's incredible growth, it only makes sense to make the same functionality available on MOVR and later Moonbeam, no matter how expensive it'll be to use long-term.

As part of this effort, we're working on two things:

1. a hackathon project is finalizing a bridge implementation which mints RMRK NFTs as IOUs on MOVR, so simplifies the RMRK functionality into simple ERC721 NFTs to enjoy the volume depth of EVM chains
2. the full RMRK functionality as Solidity contracts, the potential of which is discussed below.

The Potential

The potential of Solidity-based RMRK is twofold:

• new projects can mint advanced NFTs, appropriate for the advanced multi-chain environment of Polkadot and Kusama.
• existing projects can migrate into actually useful, interactive, reactive, evolvable NFTs with dedicated and shared item economies for long-lasting liquidity and forward compatibility.

In fact, two major projects that we can publicly talk about (and several more we have to keep quiet on) will be launching on the MVP version of RMRK's Solidity contracts in the very near future:

• Donnie Big Bags' Moonsama
• RMRK Metaverse Land Sale

We won't go into details about the latter in this announcement - a dedicated post is coming soon - but in the context of Moonsama, we've created an item which is wearable by both Kanaria and Moonsama, and will show a different resource depending on which project it's equipped in.

If you have the following rifle as an NFT, it will have three different resources (outputs): a pixelated one for equipping onto Moonsamas, a high fidelity vector one for equipping onto Kanaria, and a cover image.

Cover image:

Equipped into Kanaria:

Equipped into Moonsama:

This marks the first deployment of RMRK multi-resource cross-project-compatible NFTs on any EVM chain.

We'll let you know about the distribution details soon, stay tuned. For now, we're going back to building 🛠