ERC-7401 (Parent-Governed Nestable NFTs)

ERC-7401, officially titled Parent-Governed Non-Fungible Tokens Nesting and marked Final, was authored by the RMRK team (Bruno Skvorc, Cicada, Steven Pineda, Stevan Bogosavljevic and Jan Turk). Its core idea is plain: the owner of an NFT need not be an account or a contract, it can also be another NFT. That makes it possible to build containers that group and govern their children.

Hierarchical control rests on a propose-and-accept pattern. An incoming child token first lands in a pending array and only moves to the active array once the parent's root owner accepts it with acceptChild(), which prevents unwanted nesting. The functions nestTransferFrom() and transferChild() move tokens in and out of the hierarchy, while ownerOf() resolves recursively up to the root account and directOwnerOf() returns the immediate owner, which may be an NFT.

In the official text, ERC-7401 supersedes ERC-6059, correcting interface inconsistencies; its conceptual lineage traces back to ERC-998 (composable NFTs), though that standard is not cited in the document. It matters because it enables gaming inventories, modular collections and bundles with parent governance. RMRK documents it as its Nestable module, and its Singular marketplace uses it in production.