Metaverse ABCs: What Is Enjin (ENJ) and How It Will Revolutionize the Gaming Sector

2021/09/03 10:18:06

GameFi has been making the headlines as it takes the world by storm with its revolutionary ‘play-to-earn’ monetization models. What once was a sought-after concept is now a reality, thanks to GameFi and the myriad of projects that implement GameFi.

For those who aren’t familiar with GameFi, it is a combination of Gaming and DeFi. It’s yet another showcase of what DeFi can do across diverse sectors. GameFi is a new and emerging class of games built around providing a platform for its player base to educate themselves about the workings of blockchain technology through their beloved games.

If you’ve played games for long enough you’ve probably raked in some exclusive, once-in-a-lifetime, very rare item drops. Now imagine earning that item and then carrying it in a gaming inventory app on your smartphone, where you can access it from anywhere around the world with a smartphone and internet connection.

Then imagine hopping into another game made by another studio, where your item is now classified as an equally important and rare item as it was in the first game, or imagine checking your phone and getting a notification that your rare item has been integrated into another game where it can be used to unlock exclusive game mechanics.

There’s a lot of potential value that can be unlocked by game developers of all sizes and genres when items earned in games hold value outside of their respective games and are readily accessible for integration by anyone, rather than being confined to the virtual world of a single game, surrounded by a plethora of restrictions.

GameFi introduces a whole new world of opportunities for shared progressions, characters, questlines, and a mutually beneficial gaming ecosystem that promotes a healthier and rewarding ecosystem for its player base.

Despite there being a common misconception where gaming studios have to compete with each other and one-up the other, GameFi aims to lead a more united and collaborative space for the gaming industry, and there’s none better than Enjin in doing that.

Enjin: A Holistic Approach to Gaming

Enjin is yet another exciting project that has been striving to give gamers a more friendly, incentivized, and open gaming ecosystem with the help of the Metaverse. They started their journey from establishing a hassle-free and frictionless platform for making and selling NFTs to building a cross-chain metaverse where gamers have complete freedom and power.

Today, the Enjin platform serves as an interoperable and interconnected ecosystem of products engineered to enable the creation, distribution, storage, trade, and even integration of tokenized digital assets. Mainly focused on gaming and enterprise use cases, Enjin enables users to create ENJ-backed digital assets and use them in interesting ways. Users can create anything from NFTs to digital vouchers, to in-game items that can be used across multiple different video games.

Each minted asset is customizable to fit the preferred platform and is recorded in a smart contract, which allows the items to benefit from the advantages of cryptocurrency such as transparency, speed, cost, and security.

The main goal is that by utilizing blockchain technology to manage in-game items across various platforms, Enjin can reduce the high network fees and fraud surrounding the transfer of virtual in-game items and collectables.

And to achieve that goal, Enjin has released a set of diverse software development kits (SDKs) that allows users to both create digital assets as well as integrate them into games and apps. So far Enjin has developed SDKs for Unity, Godot, and Java, which are some of the most popular platforms and toolkits for game development.

How does Enjin Work?

At the core of the Enjin platform is the Enjin token or ENJ, an ERC-20 token built on the Ethereum network. The Enjin token is practically used to power Enjin’s main use case, which is enabling users to manage and store in-game items.

These can range from in-game currencies to tokens, collectibles, unlockables, or anything that represents unique game items. ENJ allows developers to mint items for diverse games built on top of the Enjin platform.

In order to mint in-game items, developers have to lock ENJ into a smart contract, this is because with a total supply of 1 billion ENJ tokens and over 820 million ENJ tokens in circulation, having items backed by ENJ tokens gives those items an underlying value.

Moreover, it also allows the player to acquire these items from playing those games and either trade them to others or sell them for ENJ and get some value out of it.

Enjin allows developers to create and destroy in-game items by utilizing the following steps

Acquisition: Developers buy ENJ tokens.
Minting: Developers then design exclusive in-game items using their ENJ tokens
Gaming: Players acquire tokens and use them in-game to unlock or access various game mechanics.
Trading: Players trade amongst each other.
Melting: Players sell their tokens for ENJ tokens.

Enjin’s Set of Successful Use Cases

At the time of writing this, the Enjin platform has collaborated with numerous industry giants such as:

Atari: Enjin has collaborated with Atari to bridge the gaming brand with blockchain games using the Enjin platform.

BMW: Enjin has partnered with automotive giant, BMW, to help reward BMW Vantage app users with ENJ tokens.

Microsoft: Tech Giant Microsoft uses the Enjin platform to run their social reward program called Azure Heroes.

Unity: Enjin has partnered with Unity to launch SDKs that will allow Unity’s 4.5 million developers to seamlessly integrate blockchain into their apps and games.

Moreover, popular cryptocurrency projects and exchanges such as Kriptomat, Binance, Kyber, Changelly, and Swissborg are also actively using the Enjin platform to launch blockchain-powered marketing campaigns and gamify user engagement.

Closing Thoughts

Enjin’s unique approach in establishing a cross-chain holistic gaming ecosystem could be revolutionary for the gaming industry. By unlocking the boundaries of games and helping gamers experience a free-moving ecosystem will change how we use and perceive games in the future.