Enjin Coin

What is Enjin Coin (ENJ)?

Enjin is a platform backed by the same name company that provides an entire ecosystem of gaming-focused, blockchain-based products.

Enjin is one of several exciting blockchain projects taking on the gaming industry. In addition to its rapid growth and resilience, it famously served as a tipping point for Vitalik Buterin, the Ethereum creator. Buterin found out that it was the game creators and platforms that hold power in gaming, and that dynamic hasn’t shifted when it comes to mainstream gaming. In fact, Steam banned a CS:GO account holding $5 million worth of skins as recently as September 2022, rendering them forever lost.

Digital asset ownership is one of many issues that blockchain gaming seeks to revolutionize, and Enjin is very much at the forefront of the movement.

Enjin allows developers to create in-game assets as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). They tie these assets to addresses on the blockchain rather than user accounts, which allows them to be bought, sold, and traded with real-world value.

That’s not all—Enjin seeks to offer developers the tools with which to innovate. Enjin makes it easy for games and other projects to include NFT technology seamlessly. By releasing software development kits (SDKs) for various platforms, such as the Unreal Engine SDK, developers can easily access the Enjin application programming interface (API).

What is the Enjin Platform?

The Enjin ecosystem is constantly growing. Having started with Ethereum, Enjin now has links with Polkadot via Efinity, its own Ethereum scaling solution in the gasless JumpNet, and its flagship Enjin Network. Enjin Network has been around for a while, letting gamers gather, group up, and even host virtual item stores.

However, Enjin Platform is a major part of Enjin’s offering. It’s a blockchain Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that allows developers to create and manage blockchain games. Devs can do this without the complexity of building and maintaining actual blockchain infrastructure.

Enjin Platform is a powerful suite of tools and services and can be considered an all-in-one blockchain game development platform. Enjin platform encompasses Blockchain SDKs, Platform API, Wallet Daemon, and the Efinity network.

When Was Enjin Coin Launched?

Enjin first laid its roots in the gaming industry in 2009 as a gaming community platform, with Enjin Network growing to some 20 million users across 250,000 communities. As a well-established gaming company, it pivoted to blockchain and launched Enjin Coin in 2017.

The Enjin Coin ICO in 2017 raised $18.9 million, and the project went live in 2018. This ICO saw 300 million ENJ, or 30% of the ENJ supply, available for sale. Just over 75,000 ETH was raised, and the unsold ENJ tokens were locked for 6 months to be used for community initiatives and marketing.

A month prior to the ICO, Enjin also held a presale. 400 million ENJ was sold for 38,800 ETH—worth $12 million at the time—and a further 100 million ENJ were given away as bonuses.

One of Enjin’s major milestones came in August 2018. This is when Enjin kickstarted the world’s decentralized gaming multiverse by creating the first set of blockchain assets usable across multiple games. To enable this, Enjin facilitated collaboration between six Early Adopter studios that agreed to use them. This multiverse is now 30 games strong.

In 2019, Enjin launched their blockchain game development platform, Enjin Platform, into testnet and released the Enjin Marketplace. Early the following year, Enjin Platform went to mainnet on Ethereum.

Who are the Founders of Enjin Coin?

Enjin was founded by Maxim Blagov and Witek Radomski. Blagov spearheads the company as its CEO and handles all things creative-, marketing-, and management-related.

Meanwhile, Radomski is Enjin’s Chief Technical Officer, responsible for the technical development of its products. He was the one who introduced blockchain to the company’s operations, convincing the company to accept BTC payments after hearing about Bitcoin in 2011 and 2012.

After hearing about Ethereum and its programmability, Radomski jumped in with both feet and ended up co-authoring Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1155.

EIP-1155 described a new ERC-1155 multi-token standard. It combines the properties of fungible ERC-20 and non-fungible ERC-721 tokens and performs all of their functions—even simultaneously.

ERC-1155 can be used for minting both fungible tokens and NFTs, and does so with increased efficiency. It was written with Enjin in mind, and the platform makes extensive use of the token standard.

How Does Enjin Coin Work?

Enjin’s main raison d'être is to allow developers and players to create, manage, and store digital assets for games.

The assets most often represent equipment attached to in-game characters or avatars, land in virtual worlds, in-game currencies, and the like. These may well prove to be the tip of the iceberg as the nascent industry starts to develop, however.

This digital asset ecosystem is backed by the ENJ token, an ERC-20 fungible token on Ethereum.

Developers must first acquire ENJ tokens, which they can then use to mint the in-game items they design. They do it via the aforementioned ERC-1155 standard for convenience and greater efficiency.

Gamers can then acquire these tokens, mostly NFTs, from both in-game as well as external marketplaces such as Enjin’s own EnjinX marketplace.

The players then have full ownership of their digital assets. Some games within the Enjin ecosystem, or multiverse, even allow items from other games to be used within them. Players can also freely trade tokens amongst each other on any marketplace they choose to do so.

Players have full ownership of the tokens, which are generally NFTs tied to owners’ wallet addresses rather than game accounts.

What Makes Enjin Coin Unique?

Enjin uses smart contracts to mint virtual goods. This means that developers have to acquire ENJ and then lock this ENJ away into a smart contract representing the item.

This is unique because, while players can simply use their NFTs in-game or trade them with other gamers, they can also “melt” the items.

When melting an item, as far as the player is concerned, it is sold for ENJ. The item is destroyed, and the ENJ locked into the smart contract by the item’s creator is released to the player who decided to melt the item.

This unique mechanism gives players a way to gain real-world value from in-game items outside of selling them to other players. This immediately gives tokens created on Enjin significantly more appeal than many other types of NFT.

The Enjin Platform, meanwhile, also creates value for game developers in a multitude of ways, including:

• Innovative crowdfunding. Developers can create gaming assets as fungible tokens or NFTs and offer them to gamers using various means.
• Player-driven value creation. Developers can allow users to modify, craft, build, and trade blockchain-based gaming assets.
• Eliminate black and gray markets. Reportedly costing game developers over 40% in lost revenue, players don’t need these anymore. Blockchain-enforced trading fees and royalties can be coded into the NFTs.
• Create or join multiverses. Devs can let players use their characters and items across different games of their own or collaborate with other studios.

How is the Enjin Coin Network Secured?

Enjin Coin is an ERC-20 token deployed on the Ethereum blockchain and therefore relies on Ethereum for security. Ethereum has hundreds of thousands of validators and is one of the safest, most decentralized blockchains in the industry.

However, Enjin also employs JumpNet within its platform. JumpNet provides instant, carbon-negative, and—perhaps most importantly—free on-chain transactions for NFTs and Enjin Coin. JumpNet is a private proof-of-authority blockchain validated by the Enjin team.

Minting NFTs on JumpNet requires users to trust the centralized blockchain and the validating Enjin organization. Despite that, it’s far cheaper than doing so on Ethereum since no gas fee is required and the native currency is Enjin Coin.

What is Efinity?

Enjin is also developing the Efinity network as a more decentralized, long-term solution to fees and scalability. It positions Efinity as an NFT superhighway focused on token creation, transfers, and purchases.

Efinity is meant to be a hub for all fungible and non-fungible tokens. The in-development Paratoken standard accepts tokens from any other chain including ERC-20, ERC-721, and ERC-1155 tokens from Ethereum.

Efinity, one of Polkadot’s Parachains, is targeting a throughput of up to 1000 transactions per second and block confirmations in 6 seconds.

Despite the use of EFI tokens as Efinity’s native utility token, the utility of ENJ tokens remains unaffected, and NFTs minted on Efinity will also use ENJ.

What is the Use of ENJ?

The main use of Enjin Coin is to support the minting of in-game assets by developers. These assets are deployed as tokens on the blockchain and can be fungible or non-fungible.

ENJ tokens are used to back these tokens that developers create, infusing them with a certain residual value. Uniquely, Enjin allows tokens to be melted or destroyed, releasing the ENJ backing it to the owner.

Enjin’s in-depth documentation provides developers with guides on how to create NFTs with Enjin Coin. It also brings an extensive introduction to all other facets of the Enjin platform.

Who Controls Enjin Coin?

Enjin Coin and its suite of products are controlled by the for-profit Singapore-based company, Enjin, which is still led by co-founders Maxim Blagov and Witek Radomski.

Other significant members of Enjin’s leadership team are COO Rene Stefancic and CFO/CLO Oscar Franklin Tan.

How Much Is ENJ In Circulation?

Enjin Coin has a fixed maximum supply of 1 billion ENJ tokens, out of which 80% were offered during its 2017 presale and ICO.

Of the remainder, 10% of the ENJ supply was reserved for community initiatives, marketing, beta testing, and strategic partnerships. The final 10% went to the team and advisors. Team tokens were locked for the first six months and vested over a 24-month period, while advisor tokens were only locked for two months.

According to Enjin’s website, a total of 1.2 billion assets have been created on Enjin, and there are 12.4 million ENJ tokens locked in circulating assets.

How Do You Buy ENJ?

Enjin Coin is a popular token that is quite easy to acquire thanks to its potential and high regard in the community.

One of the easiest ways to get Enjin Coin is right from the Enjin Smart Wallet. This way, you can swap a vast selection of other tokens into ENJ thanks to integration with Kyber, Bancor, and Changelly.

Enjin Smart Wallet is also a fully functional web3 wallet. It lets you connect to dApps and DeFi platforms and use other decentralized exchanges. Since ENJ is an ERC-20 token, it’s plentifully available on various DEX platforms.

You can also buy ENJ on many of the top centralized exchange platforms.

Is It Possible to Buy Enjin Coin Instantly?

How fast ENJ settles when you buy it depends wholly on how exactly you’re making that purchase.

Using a decentralized exchange that leverages layer 2 technology such as Uniswap V3 is extremely fast. You can expect swaps directly on your wallet to be fast as well.

Transacting on Ethereum without any scaling solution might be the slowest option, although it’s generally not more than a few minutes.

Buying ENJ on a centralized exchange is an instant option, but only if you plan to keep your ENJ there. If you’re buying it with the aim of storing it in your own wallet, expect a few delays when it comes to withdrawal.

How Do You Store ENJ?

Perhaps the best place to store ENJ is within Enjin’s own wallet, the Enjin Smart Wallet. It lets you manage your inventory and connect to multiple games, using your items where applicable.

You can also transact with other users of the Enjin Smart Wallet, trading coins and in-game items with ease. NFTs that have been minted on Enjin can also be melted—or sold—for ENJ using the Enjin Smart Wallet.

Enjin Coin Energy Consumption

ENJ is deployed on Ethereum, which is a vastly improved network in terms of energy consumption since its merge from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.

Enjin’s two blockchains can’t be accused of extremely high consumption either. Efinity is a Parachain on Polkadot, which makes it highly energy efficient. Meanwhile, JumpNet takes things a step further by being carbon negative.

Is ENJ a Good Investment?

Enjin is an extremely popular cryptocurrency. It’s often talked about as one of gaming’s premier projects, right up there with the likes of the Sandbox and Immutable X.

The reasons for that are clear, as gaming represents an industry with both massive potential and a real need for the sort of technology blockchain can offer.

Digital asset ownership and the Web3 revolution are coming increasingly to the forefront of the Internet. Enjin provides the toolkit for game developers and other content and platform creators to embrace this player-owned future.

The ENJ token is a function of the movement. As more developers embrace Enjin and create more in-game assets, thereby locking ENJ tokens away in those assets, its scarcity could become increasingly appealing.