Enjin Launches Polkadot Parachain for NFTs and Gaming

In the works since last summer, the Efinity parachain is courting games on existing smart-contract blockchains.

AccessTimeIconMar 15, 2022 at 1:43 p.m. UTC
Updated May 11, 2023 at 6:18 p.m. UTC
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Blockchain firm Enjin announced the launch of Efinity, the first parachain on the Polkadot network dedicated to non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Efinity’s ecosystem is set to be home to over 100 blockchain-based games and applications, the first of which is CryptoBlades, a play-to-earn NFT game with over 1 million users (it’s currently on five smart-contract blockchains with Efinity set to become its sixth).

Enjin bolstered plans to build out its Efinity metaverse to the tune of $100 million back in November. The platform’s first major funding came last July, when it raised $19 million in a private token sale led by Crypto.com Capital, DFG Group and Hashed, followed by a $20 million public token sale through CoinList in July.

“NFTs and their applications have come such a long way in the past year,” Enjin Chief Technology Officer Witek Radomski told CoinDesk in an interview. “The infrastructure to support them at scale needs to be built, with projects like this one really moving the space forward for so many users.”

Polkadot parachains allow for individual projects to create their own dedicated blockchains at scale, a workaround to NFT-based platforms that often congest their network with high volumes of transactions.

Enjin’s announcement comes at a time when rival ecosystems to Polkadot’s new tech are beginning to find footing of their own. Avalanche recently announced a $290 million fund to promote NFT and decentralized finance (DeFi) applications on its “subnets,” the first of which being the popular GameFi platform DeFi Kingdoms.

Along with the announcement of Efinity, Enjin says it has plans to roll out beta versions of its NFT.io marketplace and wallet by the end of March.

Other projects confirmed to be expanding to Efinity include Lost Relics, Dvision Network, SwissBorg, MyMetaverse, Age of Rust and the PlayNFT Twitch plugin, according to a press release.

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Eli Tan

Eli was a news reporter for CoinDesk. He holds ETH, SOL and AVAX.


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