RMRK

No native NFTs on Kusama? No problem! With RMRK, we hacked around silly things like protocol limitations and common sense!

RMRK (pronounced "remark") is a set of rules and standards for interpreting special data. By interpreting this data in a special way, tools can understand information in different ways than an outside observer might.

Imagine walking around town and seeing a graffiti of an upside down devil on a garage. You might think "huh" or "vandals" and move on. But the gang "Inverse Devils" used this graffiti as an area tag to let other gangs know they shouldn't walk around here. The gangs have a special way of interpreting this graffiti that you're not familiar with.

Or, put another way, kids in school are having an exam. As they fill out their answers, they happily tap their feet. Later, when the teacher is grading their work, he realizes they all somehow aced the test. What he doesn't know is that the kids in the class learned a special language of foot-tapping, and that the smartest one in the class has been telegraphing them answers via taps of her foot. They have a special way of interpreting the taps that others are not aware of.

Kusama is a blockchain without smart contracts. We cannot write logic onto it, so we cannot do things like Polls, NFTs, token sales, or decentralized on-chain applications. But we can put graffiti onto the chain's blocks, and we can write tools that know how to interpret these graffiti.

The rules for how to interpret this are called specifications or standards, and RMRK is one such set of rules. RMRK deals with applying rules to remarks, which is what we call blockchain graffiti on Substrate-based blockchains like Kusama or Polkadot.

RMRK is a set of rules dictating how to interpret blockchain graffiti in a way that lets us simulate logic on a chain without smart contracts.