Enjin: The Future Of NFTs For Gaming

Gaming and NFTs are booming. However, it’s fair to say that the space needs an integration layer to be able to share items cross-game and cross-chain. In fact, the reason for this is that if you want to develop an economy around gaming NFTs, you need some sort of a common marketplace that lets you trade digital goods in an agnostic way. In other terms, we lack a platform to buy and sell non-fungible items independently of the context or the crypto game. You’re panicking. Stop panicking. I know a project for this problem. It’s called Enjin and has a native token called $ENJ.

1. What Is Enjin?

Enjin is a lot of different things. It’s a wallet, a platform, a library for developers, a token and an NFT marketplace. All of these aspects of Enjin have one goal: facilitate access to NFTs and make them accessible cross-game in different virtual worlds.

First of all, Enjin is a platform with a complete tech stack for NFTs. Developers can use it to create and manage in-game NFTs:

It’s basically an API allowing to create tokens and develop an NFT ecosystem for digital goods in games:

But Enjin also comes with its own wallet. They just released the v2 this year and lets you trade tokens and NFTs:

The project issues 2 dual tokens: $ENJ and $EFI.

You can purchase ENJ on various exchanges below:

Finally, Enjin is a marketplace to trade NFTs related to gaming:

2. How Does Enjin Work?

The Enjin Coin ($ENJ) is in fact an ERC20 token on Ethereum. This is handy as it comes with all the smart contract functionality from the Ethereum blockchain. The Enjin platform contains a list of functionalities for traders, players and developers:

• Virtual goods creation and management.
• Multiple SDKs for developers.
• Marketplace: an online marketplace with over 10 million digital items.
• Enjin Beam: a digital asset distribution system allowing to send thousands of NFTs with a QR code.
• Smart wallet: Blockchain assets wallet that seamlessly links with games and apps. 1 million downloads.
• Efinity: A scaling product that will enable fast and free transactions of both ERC-20 and ERC-1155 tokens.

The marketplace is really full of items, you can access it here and browse items with the search bar:

If you’re a developer and want to give it a try there is an SDK that is quite plug-and-play. For example, you can use the Java library to connect a client to the platform, see quickstart.

Just install it with Maven:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.enjin</groupId>
    <artifactId>blockchain-sdk</artifactId>
    <version>2.0.0-alpha.9</version>
</dependency>

And connect to the client:

import com.enjin.sdk.EnjinHosts;
import com.enjin.sdk.ProjectClient;
import com.enjin.sdk.graphql.GraphQLResponse;
import com.enjin.sdk.models.AccessToken;
import com.enjin.sdk.schemas.project.queries.AuthProject;

public class Main {

    public static void main(String... args) {
        // Builds the project client to run on the Kovan test network.
        // See: https://kovan.cloud.enjin.io to sign up for the test network.
        ProjectClient client = new ProjectClient(EnjinHosts.KOVAN);

        // Creates the request to authenticate the client.
        // Replace the appropriate strings with the project's UUID and secret.
        AuthProject req = new AuthProject()
                .uuid("<the-project's-uuid>")
                .secret("<the-project's-secret>");

        // Sends the request to the platform and gets the response.
        GraphQLResponse<AccessToken> res = client.authProject(req);

        // Checks if the request was successful.
        if (!res.isSuccess()) {
            System.out.println("AuthProject request failed");
            client.close();
            return;
        }

        // Authenticates the client with the access token in the response.
        client.auth(res.getData().getToken());

        // Checks if the client was authenticated.
        if (client.isAuthenticated()) {
            System.out.println("Client is now authenticated");
        } else {
            System.out.println("Client was not authenticated");
        }

        // Closes client as part of cleanup and free any resources.
        client.close();
    }

}

3. The Team, The Roadmap And The Partners

The leadership team is a CEO, a CTO, a COO and a CFO :

Maxim Blagov, the CEO, has been working for 14 years on the project:

I like that because it means it’s not yet another rug pull and that the leadership team is deeply involved.

Now, let’s jump to the Enjin roadmap. It’s always better with a nice video:

Regarding the partnerships, it’s fair to say that the list of partners is endless:

But let me focus on the most impressive one: Microsoft. The idea is to create digital badges to reward the Azure community (Azure is the Microsoft cloud platform).

I’m quoting the Enjin website:

In the spirit of their mission to empower technical practitioners of all backgrounds, Microsoft established Azure Heroes to inspire developers to learn, coach, and build on Azure and promote healthy, inclusive communities.

A collaborative program between Microsoft and Enjin, Azure Heroes rewards developers with blockchain-based digital badges—styled as badgers—for various achievements, verifiable acts of impact, and meaningful contributions in the developer community.

Since launching as a pilot in December 2019, the program has expanded globally, being used at various major events, such as Microsoft Ignite and Create: Frontend.

Just for your information, Microsoft is this kind of company:

With fundamentals like THAT:

So when they partner with a crypto project, I start to take it very very seriously.

4. ENJ As An Investment

I guess I won’t surprise you with the price of the $ENJ token…. It’s low:

The market capitalization of the project is a modest 422 million USD:

But the gaming market will be 204.6 billion USD in 2023:

More importantly, the in-games revenue market is growing and growing year over year:

Not only will Enjin benefit from the boost of the in-game revenue market but also the NFT market is set to grow at 35% a year. Enjin is even listed in most analysis I found online:

Another thing I like to look at when I invest is the Github activity, especially in a bear market. Is the team still building?

The last updates were 3 days ago on every SDK:

5 regular developers for the core repositories:

This looks good to me: the codebase is still being worked on and they have enough developers to support it.

5. Conclusion

I like the Enjin project because it sits at the intersection of gaming and NFTs. The capitalization of these markets will grow fast in the upcoming years and Enjin is well positioned to capture some of that growth. The fact that they developed SDKs for developers tells a lot about the ambition to embrace the NFT gaming problem at the root. Also, the partnerships are very serious like the one with Microsoft: a very healthy company that could give some traction to the project. Additionally, I like the fact that the founders have been working a very long time on the project meaning that they won’t give up that easily. For me, a lot of planets are aligned. Now, what do YOU think? Ping me on Twitter to share.

Thanks for reading.
n.b: this is not financial advice