# PNinja interview

**The recent rollouts of everything being mintaur, upgradoor, rmrk wizard, and emotes. Is there more coming in the short term that you feel is necessary, and are you seeing any use?**

Yes, a few more updates are on the horizon. For the past 18 months, most of the RMRK developers have been fully dedicated to the Singular project. Integrating the EVM into it took longer than expected due to the extensive codebase of Singular and the challenge of disentangling Kusama-related code, which we intend to separate into a distinct website. This kind of work can be stifling for creativity and can make developers unhappy. Therefore, we've been eager to return to smaller projects, which lack the baggage and allow us to experiment with the latest technologies and ideas.

Mintaur V2 is currently in development and introduces more advanced functionality.

We've also recently finished a new contract initially intended for Kanaria migration but later realized it could be valuable as a standalone product. This contract, known as Migrator for now, enables you to pre-configure equippable children and whitelist users who can mint the Composable parent NFT. The custom only needs to press “Mint” on the parent NFT, and the contract automatically nest-mints all the children based on the configuration preset on the contract. This means that the creator doesn’t have to spend a lot of money on pre-minting all the parents and it’s children in advance, so the buyer will pay for the mint when he purchases the NFT. This can help artists greatly to try what works and what is in high demand, without spending tons of money in advance.

Furthermore, we've just started working on a new wardrobe experience that allows anyone to try on different compatible equippable NFTs on their owned or non-owned parent, to see how it will look when equipped or try different combinations.

While we have plenty more ideas in the pipeline, they are still in the early ideation phase, and I don’t want to jinx them too early.

**Concerning the last part of the last question, I saw a new rpg launching on rmrk which is exciting. Are you seeing adoption in EVM in other places? Are there exciting projects you can tell us about? **

There are a few but the number is very low still and we didn't focus on the adoption enough until now. As I mentioned in the beginning, Singular consumed all of our time and energy. Reflecting on this, I am wondering how RMRK would turn out if we were to approach everything from the opposite side. So our thinking was always that we need to build a makretplace first, as when we start promoting RMRK actively, we need a place where users will come, so we could capture that marketplace fee. But as Singular EVM turned out to be significantly more complex than we hoped, this delayed any other work. This set us back quite a bit in terms of achieving mass adoption. But this setback will not stop us, we worked on this too hard to give up any time soon. but at the same time it is very clear now that if we delay work that can help with mass adoption of RMRK any further, we risk losing any momentum and hope altogether (we’ll try our best to not come to that)

I have been observing some other projects that were able to catch the hype train early, and one thing that stood out to me is that they focused on supporting adoption first before actually trying to earn any money. Dev tooling, plug’n’play components, dapp templates, minting script examples, video tutorials, workshops, weekly dev calls,, etc. etc. Making sure that as many people can try building something on their standard very easily, and focusing on monetisable projects only after the adoption is spread enough.

This is a good learning experience because now that I have this experience, I think our approach is inferior. We were too blinded by the early success of Kusama. We have this amazing tech and super advanced smart contracts, but it’s so hard to build using this tech right now, that most devs just give up. So our mission now is to make it easy.

For this reason, the work on increasing adoption is the primary goal for the next upcoming months. This includes, but not limited to:

- Templates and boilerplates (a repository with minting scripts and UI to preview the result immediately), this way any devs and perhaps even non-devs, can just adjust a few parameters, replace the images/media with their own, and start experimenting
- Drop-in components and iframes - a dead simple embeddable code that accepts chain id, contract address and token id, and it will render you a fully composed nft together with equipment. This also opens up some roads for us, for example displaying equippable nfts inside of iframe on Opensea ;)
- A new and exciting campaign aims to provide artists with an easy way to create items for a shared composable PFP project (more information coming soon). I genuinely believe this initiative is essential, even if we incur initial losses (the Mint of the parent PFPs will be free). This is because social algorithms on X do not allow our news to reach beyond Twitter's grasp.
We have an exciting project in the works, where various artists can design equipable items for the parent PFP (the parent is created by RMRK), and anyone can mint them for free. Afterwards, we will be inviting some amazing artists to try their hand at creating their unique take on these equipable items for that PFP in their distinct artistic style. All earnings and royalties from these equipables will go directly to the artists (Singular will only charge its standard marketplace fee).

The biggest reason why this project is absolutely fine to be Free Mint, despite that we will spend nearly 3 - 4 weeks building it, is that this have a real potential to show new people what is RMRK and what they can do with it. As each artist will share it in their circle and this can easily spread.
- This PFP project is also a pre-requesete to finally having a full composable creation experience. Because the work on the PFP project, will cover 40 - 50% of the requirements needed to finally build a full RMRK Catalog and Composable NFT builder journey.

So to summarise we plan to work on multiple things in the months following migrations (Kanaria, skybreach, and token migrations), and the primary goal and KPII for these following months is user and artist acquisition, plus trying to go viral on the way of course :)

**The last video I did was 3 months ago on Singular, so I really do want to focus more on the RMRK side of things and, perhaps, what's most pressing on people's minds—that being their token utility/value, adoption (covered above), and skybreach. Can you give us any info in the short term about where skybreach is and where it's going next? This could tie into the kanarias as well, and who is actively working on these things?**

Certainly, the RMRK token has not received the attention was promised. Initially, the Singular was supposed to be the first big use case for RMRK token (you can use RMRK as a listing currency right now and this will give you a marketplace fee discount, as well reduction to minting fees), and that took a while, but just as trading in RMRK was added, as you probably know, there was this Multichain fiasco. For those who don’t know, Multichain was a cross-chain bridge solution., and it was the most popular for quite some time. Their team helped us bridge RMRK tokens across chains. So while on Statemine and on Moonriver it is not controlled by any third party, whenever it was bridged to any other chain using Multichain, the contract on the other side would belong to Multichain, and be closely related to the bridging process itself. This is not a security concern per se, the contract although owned by Multichain founder, he cannot just transfer any tokens that are owned by you. But this still means that once their Bridge went down, users were stuck with a token on that chain, with no liquidity or any means to bridge it back.

Fortunately, we found a very good solution to that finally. For the past several months we have been working closely with Axelar team to create a new migration and bridging contract that will utilize their new ITS protocol. In addition, we made it such a way, that RMRK multisig account will have ownership of the contract on each chain. So even if (very unlikely) Axelar team suddenly goes bust, we will still retain full control over the contracts on each chain. As a bonus, “ITS” is a superior bridge, and should be much cheaper and faster to move tokens across different chains. Axelar team also works very closely with the Squid Router team who provide an easy-to-use widget powered by Axelar, making it very to integrate on our dapps, and do cross-chain swaps without leaving the web dapp.

This unfortunately means that any token utility is currently blocked by this migration. Once the token is migrated, it will be much easier for users to swap back and forth between RMRK and other tokens, and we will integrate it into all of our products.

According to Axelar team, current ETA for ITS release is the beginning of November. And we can proceed with migration almost immediately on launch, as we already did extensive testing on the test networks

Regarding Skybreach, I am not going to lie that it is significantly behind schedule. We are however going through some intrurnal restructuring, where one party will take the Skybreach as their main resposibility. Meanwhile, we have decided to split the whole Skybreach experience into separate sub-projects and spin-offs. For example, Lands are about to be migrated to become a full equippable RMRK NFTs, so they will appear on SIngular soon and can be traded there using GBM auctions. When the land migration is complete, we will have access to these rich NFTs in the same context as all of our other NFTs, which can open up some interesting use cases because Skybreach lore and attribute data are so rich. We can use it to make some fun mini-games and experiences before the full experience is ready. Imagine a mini-game in a shared chunkies/skybreach universe, where we can detect land plot ownership and its attributes like biome type, grid position, neighboring landmarks, and terrain, and use that data to influence mechanics of any mini-game or game-like experience.

**What is the overall strategy moving forward? And difficult question, but how is funding? Is there a break point? Many people feel like they want to see delivery before funding at this stage, and of course there's bitterness, so do feel free to share your perspective and I'll do my best to portray it fairly.**

I touched a little bit on this above. Singular, and particularly how tightly coupled it was with Kusama codebase, had usfully focused on making it evm compatible, and we had no time or resources to work on anything else. This set us back quite a bit. But we are practically done now with the core essential features of the Singular marketplace, and finally can shift our focus to better things (better right now). There will always be something to improve on Singular, but at the same time, we don’t want to compete with big erc721 marketplaces, and instead emphasize features that make Singular unique thanks to RMRK standard. We will step back for some time to work on improved adoption. We want more people who are not us, creating on RMRK standard, this can create a ripple effect and maybe people will finally notice what we have built. Because I truly believe that we built an amazing thing here, we just need a) create something that can create hype, and b) help others to create something on RMRK so they help us to bring more attention to RMRK. As their success is our success. So again, a super simple-to-use dev tooling for devs, and a super simple and intuitive no-code composable builder, is the key here, we need to provide easy tools for people to unleash their creativity because I believe there are still plenty of things where RMRK standard is a perfect tool, and yet neither of us even imagined these use cases yet.

**And finally any alpha or anything else that you feel like you'd like to share. I would say that bruno has def caused a few waves in his personality of late, so there's a lot of uncertainty on if RMRK will thrive under his leadership, and if polkadot is in the vision of the future.**

This is a good and important discussion. Bruno is true visionary, I haven’t met anyone who can construct such complex and elaborate use cases in his head, and he is instrumental to RMRK vision. However, he is planning to be much less involved in RMRK (company), Singular, and all the latest mini-dapps (Mintaur, Upgradoor, Emotes.app, etc). For the past 12 months, he could not use his visionary gifts to their full potential, as a lot of his day-to-day tasks were around “CEO” responsibilities, and these are creativity killers. Partner calls, operations, helping other employees with decision-making, finances, etc,. On top of that, being in CEO position, restricts you on things you can say or do, to be yourself. So we don’t think this is the best use of his talents, and so we are trying a thing where he will have limited involvement in our internal decisions, and instead use RMRK tech to build separate projects on his own on the side. He is still an RMRK founder, and will still be using RMRK and talking about it at conferences, as well as thinking about how to deliver Skybreach more efficiently, but we will be running the rest of the product development by ourselves.

Regarding Polkadot, we will see. We love the technology and the idea behind Polkadot, especially once it realizes its full potential through XCM and the “Polkadot 2.0” vision. At this moment we need to think about where the retail is, as well as developers and artists, and it’s not Polkadot (yet?), but we are also lucky to be in the Polkadot ecosystem because we have things like Astar, Phala, Tanssi and Moonbeam to name the few, where we can utilize the benefits of both. An extensive list of tried and tested tools and resources that come from EVM, and all the extra bells and whistles that come with substrate chain, like interacting with Substrate pallets through EVM wallet, governance, and upgrading runtime with new pallets, to name the few. So we are not leaving Polkadot. But we want to blur the lines between blockchain ecosystems through UX and various tools that are available to us. The user doesn’t have to know what ecosystem they are in, and there shouldn’t be any gatekeeping based on web3 ecosystem preference.