Enjin Coin Review: Putting Gaming On The Blockchain

Enjin is a project has been growing at a rapid pace. This gaming community supports over 300,000 gaming communities, with 19 million registered gamers.

Since 2009 Enjin has enabled gamers to create websites for clans and guilds, create forums, add wikis, chat groups, and much more. And in 2017 they held an ICO in order to bring their technology onto the blockchain – as well as adding innovative new features.

However, is the Enjin Coin still worth considering?

In this Enjin review I will attempt to answer that by taking an in-depth look. I will also analyse the long term adoption potential and use cases of the ENJ token.

What is Enjin Coin?

Enjin is an ERC-20 token built on the Ethereum network. That means that the project not only brings the benefit of the blockchain to gaming, but also the benefits of smart contracts.

One huge benefit being promoted by Enjin is that by bringing gaming onto the blockchain they will be able to help gamers avoid the extremely high levels of fraud prevalent in the transfer of virtual goods.

Enjin has also broken ground on a few firsts within the Ethereum ecosystem. For example, it has become one of the first projects to test the capabilities of Ethereum’s Raiden Network, and once that goes live it should be able to handle millions of transactions.

The Enjin team has plans for dozens of features through its public SDKs and APIs, but in the spirit of brevity I’m only going to be touching on the major features in this article.

Enjin Virtual Goods

The biggest value Enjin is hoping to bring to the gaming community with its token is in the area of virtual goods. Using the included tools, developers can create coins specific to their own community, and these coins will be backed by the Enjin Coin. This adds the benefits of the blockchain, while retaining the branding and feel of the respective platforms.

The fact that items will be recorded on a single registry smart contract means any items added to the blockchain will be recognized by every Enjin wallet. This will interconnect the entire ecosystem, allowing for assets to be transferred anywhere on the platform.

This could become especially important as new games are developed specifically for the blockchain, giving developers the ability to create single assets that work in multiple games.

Enjin ERC-1155 Support

Not only does Enjin have full support for ERC-1155 assets. Its EnjinX blockchain explorer was the first to give users access to the universe of these assets. Users can now do all of the following:

• Browse the world of ERC-1155 blockchain assets and collectibles
• Search for assets and collections by name, address, and token ID
• Verify token ownership, rarity, provenance, and authenticity
• View melts, mints, transfers, and hodlers

Basically, this is a universal catalog to all of the in-game items across the entire Enjin multiverse. That means gamers can now easily browse gaming items and see when they were created, who made them, who owns them, what they do, and how to acquire them.

The immutable transparency of the blockchain has been brought to the gaming world.

Enjin Smart Wallet

Everything I’ve discussed so far is brought together in the Enjin Smart Wallet. The Smart Wallet supports Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Enjin Coin, and all the ERC-20 coins. More importantly, it also supports all your virtual items from every Trusted Platform you add, and synchs effortlessly to your Ethereum address. That includes ERC-721 and ERC-1155 items.

Within the wallet you’ll be able to trade coins and virtual game items with any other Smart Wallet user. There is support for Transaction Requests that can be sent to other wallet owners, which they will then either confirm or deny. In addition, you can set up rules or thresholds to prevent any unauthorized or undesired transactions from occurring.

The Enjin Smart Wallet was created with security firmly in mind, and one of the best security features is the Secure Keyboard that was developed for the Enjin Smart Wallet.

This keyboard is natively part of the app and it prevents any keyloggers or snoopers from seeing or capturing anything you type – including passwords and private keys. And for those who are especially security conscious, the wallet can even be setup to randomize your keys.

Adding further to the security of the wallet is two separate layers of cryptography. The hardware level includes Advanced Encryption Standard and the software uses custom software encryption to encrypt any data processed by the wallet. The wallet will also block any recording or screenshots of the wallet itself right at the operating system level.

If you aren’t interested in all these features and security you can also store your Enjin Coins in any ERC-20 compatible wallet, such as MyEtherWallet, MetaMask, or one of the secure hardware wallets.

Wallet dApp Browser

In May 2019 the Enjin team released a dApp browser for the Enjin Wallet, making it easier for users to complete transactions with a single click. With the Enjin Wallet dApp browser users can:

• Log in to multiple websites to verify their asset inventory
• Input payment details when making online purchases
• Input the delivery address for the asset being purchased

With the Enjin DApp Browser, customers can sign transactions with 100% custody over their funds while enjoying new levels of security and self-sovereignty. This takes the Enjin Wallet one step closer to becoming a one-stop-shop for all decentralized needs.

The Enjin Platform

The Enjin Platform launched on the Ethereum testnet in March 2019 and has been seeing improvements since.

The Enjin Platform is a blockchain PaaS (Platform as a Service) that allows you to create and manage blockchain games—without the complexity of building and maintaining any blockchain infrastructure or writing any blockchain-related code.

It is a robust, flexible, powerful suite of tools and services for creating groundbreaking blockchain games. All together it is comprised of four separate but interconnected parts – Trusted Cloud, Platform API, Wallet Daemon, and Blockchain SDKs.

Taken together these tools have made it easy for developers to create new games, and promise an easy way to foster mass adoption of Enjin as a gaming development platform.

• Trusted Cloud – the main backend service of the Enjin Platform; it is a cloud-hosted service that connects games to the Ethereum blockchain.
• Platform API – allows developers to query and send commands to the Enjin Platform in order to facilitate the development of blockchain games.
• Wallet Deamon – a tool that used to automate the authorization of transaction requests to and from the Trusted Cloud.
• Blockchain SDKs – Enjin released an SDK for Unity at the same time they released the Enjin Platform. There are also SDKs that have been released for Java, Godot, and GraphQL.

The Enjin Marketplace

The Enjin Marketplace is the next step in ensuring that blockchain assets can be stored and traded as easily as possible. This is one of the major themes of Enjin in bringing blockchain to mainstream adoption.

The addition of a marketplace to the Enjin ecosystem ensures users can experience:

• Security: No more risk of getting scammed by rogue traders. Buy assets with the full confidence that you will actually receive them, and sell with the certainty that you will be compensated for what you’re offering.
• Unified experience: Built with the UX that helps set Enjin apart.
• Ease of use: Complete transactions without leaving your mobile device.
• Seamless searching: Find on-sale assets and prices in one place.
• Transparency: Informed decision-making creates stronger markets.

The EnjinMarketplace removes friction from the trading process, allowing anyone who holds an ERC-1155 to quickly and easily list it for sale with just a few taps or clicks. And buying assets from the Enjin Marketplace is as easy as scanning a QR code.

Enjin Coin Team & Progress

Enjin, the company that developed the Enjin Coin, has long been the largest online gaming community creation platform. The company has been providing gamers with website builders, chat functions, forums, and a variety of guild and clan building tools since 2009.

Even before the creation of the Enjin Coin the company had over 60 million monthly pageviews, 19 million registered users, and 300,000 gaming websites.

That should massively bootstrap the adoption of the Enjin Coin, since the Enjin team will be rolling it out across the entire Enjin ecosystem of 300,000 websites and 19 million users.

Advisors to the project consist of Anthony Diiorio (Ethereum co-founder) and Pat LaBine (previous producer and technical director at Bioware). Enjin has also formed partnerships with Unity, PC Gamer, and NRG eSports.

Late 2017 saw the team run a successful ICO, raising roughly $35 million, which is meant to be spent entirely on developing, marketing and growth of the project.

While the project is young, Enjin has a strong team and resources, which meant the last quarter of 2017 saw the development of a mobile Smart Wallet, the Platform API, Java SDK, and a Minecraft plugin. 2018 has an aggressive roadmap, with plans for additional game plugins, the Efinity release, numerous SDKs and other improvements to the ecosystem.

There are several gaming related projects begun, such as Enjin Coins competitors WAX and GameCredits, but none of the three have become dominant yet.

There are definite differences between the three however, and Enjin CMO Elija Rolovic has categorized these differences by calling Enjin Coin the “Ethereum of Gaming”, while going on to call the competition nothing more than “tokenizing their centralized games/marketplaces.”

The Enjin Roadmap

You can find the Enjin Roadmap on the Enjin Coin site here. There are many exciting developments on the way, not the least of which is the partnership with Efinity. Efinity will add a sidechain to the Enjin blockchain that will act in a similar fashion to the Lightning Network for Bitcoin.

It gets around the network congestion that has been increasing on the Ethereum network, as well as the rising transaction fees. It will theoretically allow the Enjin network to scale to millions of users with fast transaction speeds and nearly zero transaction costs. And it will keep transactions on the Ethereum blockchain, so that they remain trustless.

The logical endpoint of this will be games that run on the blockchain, which is projected to create innovation within the video gaming industry. Another exciting feature is the upcoming implementation of the Enjin Blockchain Explorer, which will eventually allow browsing of all ENJ assets in the future.

If you’re interested in seeing what the Enjin team has already accomplished, have a look at the Timeline posted here.

The Enjin Coin (ENJ)

The total supply of Enjin Coins (ENJ) is 1 billion, with just a bit over 750 million of them in circulation. 80% of the ENJ were distributed during the crowdsale, while the remaining 20% were split between the Enjin team and advisors.

The circulating supply of ENJ can be expected to continue falling, because anytime a custom asset is created the corresponding amount of ENJ are removed from circulation. This is expected to increase the value of ENJ tokens over time.

ENJ Price Performance

The ENJ hasn’t seen anything really unusual since its ICO in November 2017. It followed the broader market higher in the December 2017 rally, and then dropped with the market in January. It has remained at these lower levels since then, and is trading at $0.103285 as of the end of May 2018.

Once we see a more bullish cryptocurrency market it is expected that ENJ will be lifted with the rest of the market. It is also expected to see greater price increases in response to product launches and partnership announcements. And it is also expected to rise as it gains greater adoption, due to the removal of ENJ from circulation as additional assets are added to the blockchain.

In 2019 ENJ saw a rally in the first quarter along with the broader market, reaching $0.215806 on March 8, 2019. Price has slipped steadily lower since, although there was a rally in the beginning of December that saw price double in less than two weeks from November 25 through December 5. Since then a good portion of those gains have been reversed and as of December 9, 2019 ENJ is trading at $0.076167.

Historically the all-time high for ENJ was on January 7, 2018 at $0.493384, and the all-time low was on November 2, 2017 at $0.015620.

Buying & Storing ENJ

You cannot purchase ENJ with fiat currency (excepting South Korean Won). Instead, you’ll need to use USDT, BTC or ETH. The largest exchange for ENJ is Binance, but there is also decent trading volume on LAToken and Bithumb.

Even though Binance holds the majority of the trading volume, the rest of the volume is pretty well distributed across the other exchanges. This bodes well for the price discovery of ENJ tokens as there are more exchanges to close mis-pricings.

Once you have your ENJ you will want to store it in a secure offline wallet. Perhaps your best bet is Enjin’s own wallet. However, given that this is an ERC20 token you can store it in any Ethereum compatible wallet including hardware wallets.

Conclusion

The Enjin Coin is looking to provide a benefit to the $17 billion virtual goods market. By placing game assets on the blockchain they hope to prevent fraud in the industry, which some measures have suggested affect roughly 80% of all transactions.

That would be a huge improvement for the gaming industry and gamers, and with the huge customer base that Enjin already has, the coin should be able to reach large scale adoption fairly quickly.

That said, it remains a new project, and unproven as well. So far the team has done well in meeting their roadmap goals, and they will need to continue doing so if they want to prove the viability of the Enjin Coin.

Their partnership with Unity should help drive them towards one of their goals, which is the creation of actual games on the blockchain, and this will help drive further adoption of the Enjin Coin. Nothing is proven yet, but the project does look to have a bright future.

As of 2019, we’ve seen impressive progress from the Enjin project, with the addition of an easy to use blockchain explorer, an in-wallet dApp browser, and a marketplace that allows gamers to easily buy and sell the assets acquired in the multiverse games.

Continued expansion will help drive adoption, but what the project really needs now is a blockbuster game that draws in millions of players. With that one blockbuster, they could bring both the ENJ coin and the Multiverse into mainstream gaming.

Featured Image via Shutterstock

Disclaimer: These are writer opinions and should not be considered investment advice. Readers should do their own research.

Source: https://www.coinbureau.com/review/enjin-coin-enj/