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Today’s Featured Cryptocurrency: Enjin Coin (ENJ)

Our today’s featured crypto is Enjin Coin (ENJ), one of the leading NFT-focused cryptos. Within the last week, the coin has appreciated by 20%, buoyed by the favorable overall market and the unrelenting march of the NFT and play-to-earn (P2E) concepts.

What Is Enjin (ENJ) and How Does It Work?

The Metaverse, NFTs, and P2E are among the hottest topics in the world of crypto. Every week, numerous new blockchain-based games are added to the fast-growing P2E ecosystem. Most of these use NFTs as the key component of their P2E mechanism.

As the number of these NFT-based gaming platforms increases, the need to provide cross-game functionality and NFT trading opportunities is also becoming increasingly evident. Enjin is an innovative platform used to create and integrate custom NFTs into various crypto games.

Enjin is based on the Ethereum blockchain and enables game developers to create NFTs and integrate them directly into their gaming environment. These NFTs are backed by the platform’s utility token, ENJ, and are easily convertible back to ENJ whenever owners of these NFTs decide to destroy them.

There are currently several dozen P2E games that use Enjin to enable in-game NFT functionality.

Using the Enjin platform, developers create NFTs representing in-game assets. To create each NFT, they pay a gas fee in ETH to the underlying Ethereum blockchain, plus some ENJ crypto to the Enjin platform to back the value of each NFT. They can then integrate these NFTs into their games.

Players buy these NFTs and use them within the game. These NFTs may easily be traded between players using Enjin’s NFT marketplace. Naturally, if the game developer creates their own in-game NFT marketplace, these tokens may also be traded there.

Players may destroy their Enjin-backed NFTs at any time and get the value of the destroyed NFT in ENJ coins. Using such a system offers a number of significant advantages to the gaming community.

Firstly, each Enjin NFT carries a clear monetary value at all times. With conventional NFTs, the token owner would need to first find a willing buyer to sell their NFT. If there is no demand for the particular NFT, it might remain unsold for an extended period of time. In contrast, each Enjin NFT is easily convertible to cryptocurrency, ENJ coins in this case, at any moment.

Secondly, Enjin NFTs have a clearly defined proof of origin and value. This helps game players avoid problems linked to assets with no real-world value or of a fraudulent nature.

Thirdly, since ENJ coin has a supply cap, the value of these NFTs is likely to appreciate due to the scarcity concept. Thus, an owner of an Enjin NFT has a certain assurance of their asset’s value appreciation.

Enjin also offers the benefit of a standardised, common, cross-game, and value-backed platform for NFT trade. Thus, Enjin is a big contributor to the overall development of the unified Metaverse concept.

Part of the Enjin platform is the crypto wallet, the Enjin Wallet, that is used to facilitate the trade in ENJ coin-backed NFTs.

Enjin’s Cryptocurrency

The ENJ coin is the main component powering the platform. It is probably the first popular coin that is used to back the value of NFTs across a wide variety of gaming platforms. The supply cap in-built into the coin’s mechanism acts as the key guarantor of value retention and growth for ENJ-backed NFTs.

The platform’s innovative concept, paired with the overall rise in popularity of NFTs and P2E, has driven the ENJ coin to the top 5 of the Metaverse-related cryptocurrencies. As of today, ENJ is the 5th highest-cap crypto in the Metaverse category. It is also the highest-cap Metaverse coin specifically dedicated to NFTs and cross-game use of NFTs.

The top 5 Metaverse cryptocurrencies by market cap as of January 24, 2023
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People & Funding Behind the Project

Enjin as a company was created the same year that the blockchain technology was born. It was launched in 2009 as a gaming platform by Maxim Blagov and Witek Radomski. It was only in 2017 when Enjin decided to move to blockchain.

The company held its first Initial Coin Offering (ICO) in August 2017, raising $23 million. It held another ICO round in July 2021, raising a further $20 million. Overall, the Enjin project has raised nearly $62 million in funding and continues to enjoy the status of a key NFT and Metaverse-related platform.