After rumors spread of a potential partnership between Enjin Coin and Samsung, the price of ENJ exploded, up almost 8x from time of writing in the past two weeks. Whether this alleged partnership signals legitimate cooperation or simply a marketing ploy has yet to be seen, but the implications of such a cooperation are already priced in. If you’re bullish on gaming, but missed out on ENJ, there are a few more projects to keep an eye on.
The primary function of Enjin Coin is a service that allowed developers to mint virtual items and assets as ERC-1155 non-fungible tokens by locking up ENJ. The Enjin Coin team has on-boarded a number of cryptocurrency games that have pledged to incorporate ENJ assets in the future. Additionally, the team is working to release Software Development Kits for a number of languages to make game development and ENJ integration more palatable.
Initially, the primary focus of Enjin Coin was to provide tools to gaming communities on Enjin Forums to integrate ENJ and ENJ-backed assets into their gaming servers, most prominently in Minecraft. However, the project seems to have abandoned that direction, perhaps due to the significantly diminished popularity of the Enjin Forums within the past several years.
Alas, if you are interested in the gaming niche within cryptocurrency, and missed the boat on ENJ, or aren’t too confident about its further potential, there are several other great projects to look into. Here are three of the most notable that everyone in the niche is talking about.
Loom Network (LOOM)
Loom Network’s killer application is a system called Plasma, a sidechain ecosystem alongside Ethereum that provides a much more feasible and intuitive environment for dApps to flourish. Developers and dApp owners pay subscription for their standalone sidechain in LOOM to provide an experience akin to a toll road next to the rush hour freeway of the Ethereum network. DApps on plasma are propagated by Loom’s miners, and users experience super fast transaction confirmations and zero transaction fees.
Dubbed “EOS on Ethereum”, Plasma alleviates many of the burdens associated with blockchain gaming on Ethereum. Additionally, the team is building several in-house dApps that run on Plasma, most notably the Zombie Battleground trading card game. LOOM currently has a market cap of roughly US$45 million.
Decentraland (MANA)
Decentraland can best be described as a “decentralized Second Life”. It is a virtual reality world in which players maintain complete ownership of its virtual real estate. Land owners can build their own setting through the Decentraland editor software. More elevated activities and events can be built through the Decentraland SDK, too. Currently, community members have plans to create everything from amusement parks, to casinos, to VR shopping districts, to even a university.
MANA is the currency that governs the virtual landscape and also the medium for purchasing land parcels. When real estate was initially sold in auctions, MANA associated with winning bids was burned, creating a deflationary metric for the currency. The current market cap of MANA is just shy of US$49 million.
XAYA (CHI)
With a market cap of under US$2 million, XAYA flies under the radar relative to the projects mentioned previously. Don’t let that fool you, as XAYA represents one of the most technically advanced blockchains in the space. XAYA comes from the inventors of blockchain gaming via the Huntercoin experiment, and represents a custom blockchain geared specifically for gaming. Among its features includes language agnostic development for game creators, a state channel scaling solution coined “game channels”, and a unique ruleset that makes game activity straightforward and efficient for minimal bloat to the network.
The big distinctive feature from XAYA, however, comes from the upcoming release of Soccer Manager Crypto, which will run server-less on the XAYA blockchain. The Soccer Manager franchise is a massive ecosystem with over 25 million game downloads. Their most recent release, Soccer Manager 19, eclipsed 1 million downloads in its first week on the market. The launch of SMC is right around the corner, and is expected to carry a similarly explosive reception. In addition to Soccer Manager Crypto, an MMO sandbox/real-time strategy game, Taurion, was also recently teased and is being developed in-house by the team.