How will NFTs bridge traditional gaming with blockchain? Enjin’s CTO Witek Radomski explains
When it comes to nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, the subject is often a hit or miss for traditional gamers. While some players welcome the idea of being able to trade in-game digital collectibles for real money, others lament that NFTs could potentially take away the inherent entertainment built within games. So can NFTs contribute any additional value to traditional games, other than turning them into play-to-earn “moneymakers?”
To answer this, Cointelegraph Markets Pro spoke to Enjin’s chief technology officer and co-founder Witek Radomski via an ask-me-anything session. Enjin offers a comprehensive suite of products for creating, tokenizing, trading, distributing and integrating NFTs into the virtual world of GameFi. Notable projects using the service include Lost Relic. In addition, Microsoft Azure is working with Enjin to gamify their developer experience with Azure Heroes NFTs. When asked about the future of GameFi, Radomski explained that it’s difficult to build a good-looking game that’s also fun to play, and it’s even harder to grow a community around a game that sticks:
“We’ll experience a renaissance of blockchain gaming once things settle down with the bear market and more established developers focus on fun games, NFT utility and thinking beyond simply earning crypto coins through playing a game.”
Radomski is a big believer in using NFTs to gamify businesses. “Anywhere you can grant users access, special experiences, or exclusivity, NFTs are amazing. Nearly everyone online is creating some kind of digital content these days, and easy-to-use NFTs can help people give history, ownership, digital rights, and utility to everything being created.” Radomski elaborated that NFTs fit specifically into this niche as game developers are constantly creating insanely cool games and content and need a way to present their idea to gamers that’s immutable. In addition, he emphasized their role in validating one’s digital identity in the face of a looming impersonation crisis:
“In a couple of years, bots can perfectly deepfake any human or artwork. Artists, designers, and musicians may have identity crises where celebrities, politicians, game streamers, and eventually, ordinary people will be constantly scammed by them. If you value your digital identity, your consciousness, and your validity in the new society, blockchain is the only thing that can both prove you created something.”
To bridge the utility gap, Enjin is creating a complete end-to-end platform for building and using NFTs. Game developers would need to have their own blockchain development team pumping in months or years of effort to develop an NFT solution without such a platform. By building on Enjin, they can directly access the middleware and backend APIs, wallets, an internal marketplace, and a blockchain (Efinity) that is built for user experience with NFTs.
As for the ecosystem, Enjin’s namesake coin can also be infused into NFTs on Ethereum. Its decentralized, cross-chain network for NFTs, dubbed Efinity, is built on Polkadot (DOT). It is designed for optimization of games and the capacity to mint and distribute potentially millions of NFTs. The overall Enjin community of users and developers has grown significantly over the years, with 150,000 Enjin Coin wallet addresses alone.
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