Efinity: Infrastructure for all metaverses on Polkadot
NFTs are the most popular thing in the recent crypto world and they are being minted across all the different blockchains. However, most of them still struggle with a lack of interoperability, high transaction fees and user experience.
Founders of Enjin, a major player in the NFT field, developed a brand new solution to solve these problems by using the Substrate framework to create a next-generation blockchain called Efinity, which will serve as infrastructure and baseline for other NFT projects.
By creating a new Paratoken standard on Polkadot & Kusama that will support non-fungible tokens and makes them much more interoperable and easy to use with minimal fees, Efinity will become a base layer for NFT creation in the Polkadot ecosystem.
The story behind Efinity: look for Enjin behind everything
It all began with Enjin
Enjin is the first NFT platform ever built on Ethereum. Enjin was founded in 2009 by Maxim Blagov and Witek Radomski. Since 2017, it's a platform with a special orientation — non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Witek Radomski developed Etehereum’s ERC-1155 token standard in 2018 and he with his team is developing a new token standard for Polkadot as you will see later on.
Firstly, let's have a quick review on which token standards exist on Ethereum today so you can get into this topic more in-depth and understand why they are relevant
- ERC-20: fungible token standard, the most common one (examples: DAI, BAT, LINK)
- ERC-721: non-fungible token standard (for example CryptoKitties)
- ERC-777: it has some advanced features to interact with tokens over ERC-20 like rejecting tokens from blacklisted addresses or sending tokens on behalf of different address
- ERC-1155: standard for smart contracts that manage multiple token types at once (like ERC-20 or ERC-721), so it's ideal for gaming NFTs such as in-game items due to savings on gas fees because it mixes many different tokens into a single contract.
Why Efinity? The future is multichain!
But with onboarding so many new games and users, blockchain game developers have encountered some difficulties. Ethereum is too inflexible to build large mainstream games, it has issues with high fees and transaction throughput. So here comes a moment why the Enjin team decided to create a sister chain by using the Substate framework on Polkadot.
The main advantages of building Efinity parachain on Polkadot are
- estimated 700–1000 TPS
- supporting up to 120 million token mints per block
- transaction batching
- transactions confirmation within 6 seconds
- minting and creating millions of NFTs for pennies
- full integration with the Enjin ecosystem including the Enjin Wallet, Enjin Platform and NFT.io marketplace
From Jumpnet into Polkadot’s Parachain
JumpNet is a high-speed bridge network that allows creators to mass-distributing of thousands of NFTs at zero cost. JumpNet uses Proof of Authority (PoA) consensus logic on a network that is Ethereum-compatible, to bring gas-free scaling to Ethereum.
Tokens that are created on JumpNet can simply jump between Ethereum or Efinity. By the use of JumpNet, developers will be able to reach mainstream users and provide them with modern experiences without worrying about the unprecedented rise of gas fees that makes token minting, trading and distributing unsustainable.
Earning EFI
Staking Enjin Coin on Efinity
At the launch of Efinity, you will be able to stake Enjin Coin into nodes/collators. For that staked ENJ, you will receive a native token of Efinity called EFI. For staking, 15% of the total supply of EFI is reserved to be distributed out over 8–10 years.
themStaking NFTs
In Enjin, you can inject ENJ tokens into an NFT and with that, you added the value of that NFT. Knowing that, by owning an NFT that has injected ENJ, you can also stake those NFTs, that are automatically delegated to some collator and for that, you receive EFI tokens as well.
Placing bids on NFTs
There are thousands upon millions of NFTs all over the crypto space. But how anyone can get oriented in their price valuation of them? Do they all worth millions or thousands, or just a few dollars? How does anyone know besides their past prices that they were sold or swapped?
With a new feature of Efinity, users can place bids on various NFTs or even on some specific collections by which they set up their price floor. And that behavior is appreciated because those users bring some value to the ecosystem. For that bidding, they are rewarded with EFI tokens.
Efinity: the parachain on Polkadot
Efinity secured the 6th auction slot on Polkadot by raising 7,69 mil. DOT in the crowdloan from 8 607 contributors. That is a huge support from the community for the first NFT parachain on Polkadot!
NFT.io marketplace
By developing an open marketplace, where users can bid on any NFT, Efinity and Enjin are coming one step ahead of other NFT blockchains. On NFT.io, users can bid even for NFTs that aren't listed for sale.
Fuel tanks
Fuel tanks and discrete accounts will enable easy and almost no-barrier on-boarding for non-crypto users. Those who don't even want to install a crypto wallet or a plug-in into their game. The biggest adoption level comes from the people who use blockchain and doesn’t even know about it because they are exempted from paying transaction fees.
When developers will place EFI tokens in Fuel tanks, those funds can then easily subsidize the transaction expenses for their users.
100 million fund from Enjin
Enjin announced their $100 mil. fund for developers to incentivize them for building the Metaverse on Efinity. It will support a wide variety of use-cases, so any game developer, NFT creator, or collector can apply for the fund.
Paratoken standard
Efinity is developing a new token standard called Paratoken. That is going to be interoperable with any parachain on Polkadot and Kusama, as well as with other blockchains. So many different kinds of parachains can start building their own paratokens.
The Paratoken standard will accept both fungible and non-fungible tokens from any other chain, including the popular Ethereum standards such as ERC-721, ERC-1155, and ERC-20.
EFI: the first paratoken on Polkadot
EFI is the native token of Efinity and the first demonstration of paratoken on Polkadot.
EFI will serve those specific purposes:
- transaction fees,
- marketplace fees,
- staking,
- governance.
The total supply is 2,000,000,000 EFI tokens.
Conclusion
Gamers just wanna play games, they don't want to be disturbed by any kind of blockchain tech. They don't want to claim cryptocurrencies, or wallets or be worried about security because they just simply want to spend their time with the game. And above all, they definitely don't wanna pay 10$ fees for transactions, they just want to have the most pleasant user experience without any disturbance.
This is why the Enjin team came up with the next-generation blockchain concept and developed Efinity. The first metaverse highway on Polkadot will bring the infrastructure and standards for all kinds of non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
With their scalable and easy-onboarding solution, open marketplace and new Paratoken standard, they have a really big chance to disrupt the gaming industry and move it to the next level.
The time for the cross-chain evolution of NFTs has just begun. Efinity will serve as a decentralized multi-chain highway that supports both fungible and non-fungible tokens from any other chain.
If you like this article, consider supporting us by the nomination of your tokens to Kusama or Polkadot validator going by the POLKADOTTERS name.
