RMRK and Statemine / Statemint NFTs

🚨🚨🚨 Edit, Aug 25 2022: A new runtime upgrade has been enacted on Statemine which allows native trading of Statemine NFTs. Read the below for differences between NFT flavors in Polkadot and Kusama!

Statemine and its Polkadot version Statemint are common-good parachains for generic balance tracking of custom assets. Custom assets can be non-fungible tokens (NFTs) or fungible tokens like $RMRK.

There is a common misconception that Statemine / Statemint NFTs are "Kusama NFTs" or "Polkadot NFTs" respectively.

Polkadot NFTs do not exist natively on the relay chain (Polkadot itself), but Statemint (a parachain on Polkadot) can have NFTs, and these should be referred to as "Statemint NFTs" and not Polkadot NFTs.

The same goes for Kusama, where Statemine can have NFTs, referred to as "Statemine NFTs". However, the development of the RMRK specification enabled Kusama to have NFTs natively, and these are Kusama NFTs or better known as RMRK NFTs.

In addition to those described above, there are other flavors of NFTs within the Dotsama ecosystem - see the diagram below for an overview.

Trading “Kusama NFTs” of RMRK NFTs is enabled on Singular, but you can now also trade Statemine NFTs on Singular. Statemint NFT trading is coming at a later date.

Summary

• Statemint is a parachain on Polkadot. Statemint can have NFTs (i.e., Statemint NFTs), but Polkadot does not natively have NFTs (i.e., Polkadot NFTs are not a thing).
• Statemine is a parachain on Kusama. Statemine can have NFTs (i.e., Statemine NFTs), and initially Kusama did not natively have NFTs (i.e., so initially Kusama NFTs were not a thing). But the RMRK specification enabled Kusama to have NFTs natively.
• Thus, Polkadot NFTs don’t exist, and Kusama NFTs are RMRK NFTs.
• There are other flavors of NFTs in the ecosystem, but social consensus seems to be converging on RMRK's implementation due to their advanced features and availability across infrastructure.
• Statemine NFTs can now be traded on Singular!