Enjin

Enjin Coin (ENJ) is the native cryptocurrency of gaming company Enjin. It can be earned through in-game achievements and used to buy virtual goods on gaming platforms. The Singapore-based company is known for the digital Enjin Marketplace and its plug-ins for the popular video game Minecraft, among other products.

As of December 2021, ENJ’s all-time-high price was $4.82 in November 2021, which came after Enjin launched a $100 million fund to support projects in its ecosystem. Some of those projects will be on its newer Efinity blockchain, as will other games and applications.

In January 2021, ENJ rose as it became the first gaming cryptocurrency to be approved by the Japan Virtual Currency Exchange Association (JVCEA) for use in Japan. Enjin Coin is now listed on Japan’s Coincheck exchange, where users can purchase it with yen.

But a bigger rally followed in March 2021 as Enjin started its Efinity network. ENJ is the currency staked to validate transactions on Efinity, allowing users to earn a then new EFI token.

Enjin developed the Efinity network to host trading of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). It was built on the Polkadot blockchain to avoid Ethereum’s rising ‘gas’ (transaction) costs, and Enjin sold $20 million in EFI tokens through a public sale on crypto exchange CoinList in June 2021.

ENJ is an ERC-20 token that runs on the Ethereum blockchain. New ENJ tokens are created when users earn certain tokenized assets on participating games and “melt” those assets into ENJ. Users can then use the coins to buy different in-game goods or trade them on crypto exchanges.

Games and communities can mint custom tokens with a predefined exchange rate against Enjin Coin and a maximum supply. Users can always exchange the custom tokens for ENJ in their Enjin wallets at the fixed exchange rate. The custom tokens can be NFTs, and ENJ can also be used to validate transactions on the Efinity network.

Enjin was founded by Maxim Blagov and Witek Radomski in 2009, and it started a gaming community platform that same year. It entered the blockchain technology sector in 2017 with the launch of ENJ. The cryptocurrency assisted the trading of virtual goods across Enjin’s gaming platforms and communities.

Enjin’s second plug-in for Minecraft was introduced in 2020 and was the company’s first plug-in to incorporate blockchain technology. The plug-in allows players to drop blockchain tokens into their Minecraft servers and to trade those assets through either the server or on external platforms like Enjin Marketplace.

In 2020, the firm also launched the Enjin Platform, which allows game developers to integrate blockchain tokens into their games without needing to learn blockchain coding.

In late 2020, Enjin appointed former Microsoft marketing director Alex Solomon as an executive director. Solomon had been at Microsoft for more than 20 years and headed up the company’s Azure cloud business in Western Europe, where he had led Azure Heroes, an NFT rewards program for developers that Microsoft had worked on with Enjin.