01 — Acquisition

Game developers can acquire ENJ via from cryptocurrency exchanges.

02 — Minting

“Minting” is just a nifty term for “Infusing gaming items with ENJ and turning them into ERC-1155 tokens”.

Game developers might mint in-game currencies, items such as swords, guns, sidekicks, tanks, spaceships, characters plots of land, planets — imagination is the limit.

Any in-game asset, or even the game itself can be minted.

Every minted digital asset has real-life value, as ENJ is used to create it.

The most important variable (in-game economy design vise) when minting a large volume of in-game items (currencies, or mineable resources, for example) is the supply model.

Efinity, our upcoming Ethereum scaling solution, will support six different token supply models, in order to meet the needs of game developers in regards to the game economy design.

03 — Gaming

There are a couple of ways gamers can acquire ENJ-based digital assets:

In-Game Rewards (Examples)

finishing a quest and getting a sword

referring a friend and earning a bit of in-game currency

cutting down a tree and ending up with a tokenized branch with which you can craft a bow

Purchases

either in-game and/or via official marketplaces from game developers

peer-to-peer, directly or via approved, regulated secondary marketplaces

04 — Trading

Enjin Coin-based virtual items earned or purchased by gamers are not kept on the game servers — they are held safely in their private, secure Enjin Wallets.

Every trade transaction, whether it’s trading items for items, or ENJ for items, has to be confirmed by a gamer via his or hers Enjin Wallet.

Efinity will support escrow of multiple tokens — which, combined with trade confirmations, will result in a layer of security that should eliminate most, if not all types of scams in multiplayer games.

I feel that it’s important to make a difference between an items intrinsic value and it’s ENJ-backed value. A wizard's staff might have only 10$ worth of Enjin Coin-backed value — but it could be sold for hundreds or thousands of times more. It all depends on its utility, rarity, history and/or other game-specific variables that might be tied to the blockhain-powered item.

The intrinsic value of a tokenized item could depend solely on it’s creator — consider a famous Twitch streamer that crafted an enchanted sword, a talented artist that created a skin for a rifle or a real-life architect that built a magnificent castle.

Those types of ENJ-backed items will be possible due to token bundles — again, one of Efinity’s features. Token bundles will allow for compound items: crafting a sword from 10 pieces of steel that has 0.1 ENJ in backed value each, and ending up with a sword that has 1 ENJ in backed value.

Enjin Coin’s second development update introduced two nifty features : whitelists and bound tokens, which, when combined, can allow game developers to regulate (or obliterate) secondary marketplaces, and apply a trading fee on all marketplace transactions.

As game developers lose up to 40% of their revenue on gray marketplace trading, this seems like a useful value proposal and an innovative monetization model.

Step 05 — Melting

Gamers can obtain Enjin Coin (ENJ) in several ways:

By “ melting” ENJ-based virtual items.

ENJ-based virtual items. Purchasing Enjin Coin via a cryptocurrency exchange.

“Melting” is a term used to describe turning ENJ-backed virtual items back into Enjin Coin. The process is the exact reverse of minting, with one key difference — the percentage of ENJ that can be acquired by melting an item.

The percentage depends solely on the choices made by the game developer that minted the item — and it can never be less than 50%. (eg. a sword that was minted with 2 ENJ, then melted — a game developer would receive 1 ENJ, the gamer would receive 1ENJ).

One thing you should understand about melting is that it’s the absolute worst scenario — it means that the digital items intrinsic value is less than it’s ENJ-backed value. It means that the server, or the game is dead, and that the tokens have no utility — even though one could argue they could have hold some value as collectibles.

The melting feature does provide a sort of an “insurance”, and will provide an incentive for a vast majority of gamers to purchase in-game items which they wouldn’t get otherwise — additionally providing an ethical way to implement microtransactions.

Purchasing cryptocurrencies is currently a complicated process, so our long-term plans are to enable seamless fiat-to-crypto conversion (and vice-versa) inside the Enjin Wallet itself — thus providing gamers with an easy interface to cash-in and cash-out.

Other Use-Cases

Minting ENJ-based items is not limited to game developers — there are several other use-cases in the gaming industry. Minecraft communities will be able to implement Enjin Coin via our Minecraft plugin, for example in order to sell ranks, subscriptions and items, or enable their members to earn ENJ in-game or via online forums, as engagement rewards.

Other types of game industry organizations and individuals that might use Enjin Coin to mint custom items are esports teams, gaming guilds & clans and gaming influencers — use-cases typically revolve around incentivizing engagement and retaining fans or community members by rewarding them with custom minted digital assets — branded coins, limited-edition items and similar stuff.