Microsoft has officially established a partnership with Enjin on Wednesday, stating the two organisations are working together on a project called ‘Azure Heroes’.

Azure Heroes is an incentive-based and gamified, loyalty style rewards scheme. It features points based ecosystem where proactive and helpful members of the Microsoft Azure blockchain development community can be awarded for a range of activities.

Successful candidates are identified and selected from a pool of applicants, then led by Microsoft Employees. They are either self-nominated or chosen by other community members

“Azure Heroes aims to reward individuals for verifiable acts of impact such as coaching, creating demos, building sample code, blogging about Azure or completing certain challenges​. Community members that have demonstrated their contributions will be recognised with badges across a number of categories.” Official Website, Microsoft Azure Heroes

These ‘heroes’ act like ambassadors for the Microsoft Azure Blockchain, who voluntarily lend their support and represent the community as a whole.

In return Azure Heroes are rewarded with points, which can be redeemed for ‘digital badgers’. There are five categories of members: each of which with its own associated badger. Each are in limited supply, to varying degrees.

Inclusive Leader – 100 digital badgers in supply Content Hero – 250 available Community Hero – 550 available Mentor – 800 available Maker – 10k available

Microsoft’s digital Azure badgers clearly appear to be inspired, at least in part, by the prevalence of the Crypto Kitties phenomenon. Crypto Kitties were stylised, digital representations of kittens which reached astonishingly high prices when sold at auction.

Each badger is assigned its own unique blockchain identifier via non-fungible tokens (NFT), built on the Ethereum ERC1155 standard.

“Because each badger is scarce with its own transaction hash, and not simply a copiable image stored on a central server, they require a blockchain wallet to safely store them… some badgers are more difficult to earn than others and have a verifiably fixed supply which you can see for yourself on the public ledger.” Official Website, Microsoft Azure Heroes

Since the announcement Enjin Coin, the native and eponymous token of the Enjin blockchain ecosystem, has seen a huge boost in value.

Enjin’s price pump has ben reported by some as seeing up to 50% over two days at its peak. Enjin saw a similar surge in value in March after it had partnered on a different project, with Samsung.

What is interesting is that this news had actually been preempted upon by the Enjin community long before it appeared on any major crypto news outlet, all the way back in late-October.

In fact, the news was not shared by any large cryptocurrency-oriented news sites until after the official announcement had been released. It is unclear whether this is the result of incompetency, undisclosed financial interests, or otherwise?

via CoinMarketCap

Microsoft is famous in the video-games sector for leading and having established the global ‘Xbox’ interactive-entertainment brand .

It is a largely independent entity when compared to Microsoft as a centralized blue chip organisation with a range which includes a line of consoles, PC-oriented firmware, and marketplaces.

Xbox is also, itself, a publisher and developer of games, whilst also owning a handful of second and third party development studios. If this partnership is successful, Enjin may have an opportunity to become a part of the Microsoft macro-system.