Zug, Switzerland — RMRK, an advanced nonfungible token project, released its Kanaria bird NFT project, ushering in the first wave of next-generation NFTs.

“The long-anticipated release of Kanaria and trading has been well met by the community and Bruno, with vision beyond his time, has been able to achieve with the RMRK standard on Kusama what many on Ethereum are still trying to accomplish,” said Mahalleinir from D1 Ventures, an early backer.

In March 2021, RMRK launched a gamified “initial collectible offering” called Kanaria, pioneering an NFT crowdfunding approach that brought in a total of $6 million in limited edition egg-NFT sales. Over 8,500 out of a total of 9,999 eggs were claimed by participants.

With an innovative feature of on-chain emotes, owners and observers could leave reactions on these NFTs, influencing the look, feel, functionality and inventory of birds that would “hatch” from the eggs. Since starting in September 2021, the eggs have hatched into advanced NFTs on the Kusama blockchain (Polkadot’s value-bearing canary network).

“RMRK NFTs are natively connected to every chain that connects to the [Kusama] relay chain. They are multichain by default,” said Bruno Škvorc, project founder of RMRK, in an explainer and announcement thread.

With this release, Kanaria is now a full-fledged NFT ecosystem, complete with a secondary market where items (such as wearables and backgrounds) are traded between bird owners. There are plans to release more collections of compatible NFTs far into the future.

The RMRK team is looking to build on its success with Kanaria and make the full RMRK 2.0 standards available for adoption across all substrate-based ecosystems and later into Ethereum Virtual Machine chains such as Polygon and Moonriver.

With powerful partnerships with some of the biggest parachains and candidates in the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem already sealed, the RMRK standards for NFTs 2.0 are poised to become the first unofficial shared-runtime environment in the Polkadot ecosystem. This allows for seamless teleportation of nonfungible assets to and from any supported chain natively and at almost zero cost, while the multichain evolvable nature of these NFTs opens new, unprecedented doors.

“[…] Imagine […] coming up with a game in the future and simply reusing the NFTs that already exist by adding a new resource to them — giving them eternal liquidity and long-lasting forward compatibility without planning in advance […] imagine if you could put a branded hoodie onto a cryptopunk. How much exposure is that?” Škvorc said.

You can learn more about RMRK here, take Kanaria for a spin here, and play around with its official minting and trading user interface for 1.0 NFTs called Singular here. You can also watch a live demo of Kanaria’s functionality in this replayable crowdcast.

Reach out to the team via email, on Telegram or Twitter, and read RMRK’s blog on Subsocial.