Why RMRK Matters for Artists

"We’re not there yet" is perhaps the most common statement I give all my artist friends when they ask about crypto—and more recently, NFTs.

I have a lot of friends in almost every artistic industry, and I’ve been passionate about crypto since 2016 just dreaming of the time where I could invite all my friends into this amazing world. I was so excited about the possibilities that I even finished a novel 6 years ago, based in a world where there were decentralized governments run on blockchain, metaverses and NFTs; this was all before the crypto industry even used those terms (at least, commonly).

Finally, I’m starting to say to my friends "we’re close."

Finally, I’m inviting a few of my artist friends to experiment.

Finally, we’re approaching a place that an artist can focus on creating with tools that EXPAND their abilities, rather than inhibit them behind walls of incomprehensible tech. Artists simply want to create. They don’t want to deal with license, business, marketing, or barriers. They want to simply do what they do, and be able to do more of what they do, better. They want to be appreciated.


In this article, I want to talk about what RMRK 2.0 offers from the artist’s perspective:

1. A low-barrier place to create on the cutting edge, with the newest tech available, and with a build-in audience that is excited about what they are creating on these platforms.
2. An NFT standard that allows them to express nearly the full range of their art, without the technological limitations of most other NFT standards.
3. The ability to earn a living, and to have passive income potentially forever.
4. The ability to easily partner with developers, other artists, and business-minded individuals to create innovative projects and worlds.

Okay, that’s great and all, but how about a concrete example?

Let’s say a musician composes a small piece and makes an NFT with it. They partner with another artist to "nest" the music with the image so that that image owns the music.

That NFT sells, and maybe it is popular enough that another party, a game developer, just wants the music. So the owner of the NFT splits the music from the image, and sells the music alone to the game developer.

The game developer nests the music with a desirable item in the game, and game players put in time and energy and money to acquire that item.

The item is so highly desired that a fashion brand decides to purchase that item and equip it to a piece in their fashion line, and resells the entire outfit, with the music, to a collector who then rents out the costume to a virtual event.

To the creator, the original musician, they just made something they liked, but then they got to see their art cross many industries, and, in every single exchange, they can see exactly how the music was used and they are paid royalties—only only of the music itself, but as a part of the entirety of the piece they are nested with. The value of the music scaled to the value of the entire project it was attached to.

While there multiple advantages to the developers and collectors as well, using the RMRK standard, this article is focused on the artist’s perspective so I won’t go too deeply into those advantages.

When I talk general crypto to my artist friends, they have a hard time wrapping their head around the ideas, the finance, the complex keys and the safety precautions, but when I give examples like this to my artist friends, they get excited about the possibilities and they want to know how they can start.

I think that this is one of the reasons that the NFT world has flourished on Dotsama.

There’s a large but intimate community that tends to be more tech-savvy than the larger crypto ecosystem, with a huge influx of developers based on recent statistics, and at the same time, the power of NFTs on RMRK is attracting a lot of talented non-crypto native artists.

We’re finally, for the first time in my crypto life, seeing real artist communities merging with developer communities, and it’s happening organically on Dotsama.

** What does organically even mean?**

It means that we’re attracting people that are passionate and interested in their craft, first and foremost, and they are coming because of the ease of use, and the power, of the tools being given them. They are coordinating on social platforms to create never-before-seen combinations of technology and art.

Artists can explain directly to the developers what they need, and from there, things are being made quickly, and ambitiously. In return, the developers are suggesting tools that they’ve built, throwing them at entire communities of artists to see what can come out of it.

Somewhere at the meeting of those feedback loops, we’re seeing a metaverse emerge with passion and enthusiasm that blows my mind.

I don’t know how to express how deep and important the implications of this moment are for artists who want to focus solely on their craft. I’ve lived with literal starving artists for decades—people who have to scrap by just because their contributions—even when massively popular—are given to predatory systems that don’t reward the artist for their skills.

And, finally, some of you may be asking why artists are so important?

Well, artists are the ones that continue to challenge our perceptions, that take a step back, and ask questions that most people never consider. Most of the entire SF genre could be broken down as simply asking the "what if" question, and from it has identifiably come many of our greatest human concepts and inventions—including the word "metaverse" itself I might add.

Artists are the visionaries of our world, and the ones constantly pushing the limits of human potential. They do so through a medium that impacts us on an emotional and logical level, which is to say, in the most powerful way possible: through personal experience.

One suggestion that I can offer the developer world, working on creating these tools for the mass world, is that even though most the NFT world is currently focused on visual artists, let’s not forget the writers, the dancers, and the musicians. Let’s not forget about the artists working with physical mediums, and while I understand that in many cases we’re still "not there yet", we should keep in mind those yet to come.

KSM Donations can be sent here: D8WrK1jsFy9zpFwFZStaDTmX32pMZVdwXTm5rt9LsRKBQrz