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The gaming industry is a multi-billion dollar global opportunity for crypto, and we're not just talking about CryptoKitties and betting everywhere.
Decentraland and Enjin projects are encrypted at the cutting edge of cryptography and gaming.
While he was writing this story, the news broke that both project tokens were included in Coinbase's latest series of resources that he is exploring for a possible listing.
This is an important vote of confidence (or a mad decision by Coinbase, as some of my colleagues here at EWN have suggested) about both the strength of their technology offerings and the trajectory of adoption.[[[[to update – MANA has been listed on Coinbase Pro]
However, the two projects are very different animals, as we will see.
For the new generation of cryptic investors who place a premium on fundamentals rather than obsess over speculative price potential, they deserve attention.
Decentraland is one of the strongest projects in the industry
Decentraland, founded by Argentine Esteban Ordano, is a virtual decentralized world in which it is possible to purchase 10m x 10m LAND packages. The world currency is MANA. He is launching his second LAND auction next week (10 December) and there are only 9,350 packages up for grabs. Total packages in the world are limited to 90,000.
The first LAND auction saw 34,356 parcels sold for a total of 161 million MANA, but 9,331 were not sold. It was in the first auction that the Genesis City layout was created. The SDK is in alpha version with the full launch which took place at the beginning of next year.
Over 161 million MANAs were spent on LAND during the first auction, amounting to about $ 30 million at the time (it ended in January 2018). However, after the conclusion of the auction there were still 9,331 parcels of LAND left unused, so now there is a second chance to join the LAND race.
Binance association
The project has just concluded an agreement with Binance in which there are 1,875,000 MANA available and a package with the Binance brand of LAND for the lucky winners of the current competition.
Binance Coin (BNB) is one of the major currencies that can be used to buy LAND in the auction.
The last cryptoasset that joins this list is the Zilli token of the Zilliqa platform. Dai and MKR are also among the currencies accepted in the auction.
The owners of LAND are free to build whatever they want on their land, although game developers are coding the filters so that users can choose not to see what they might consider unwanted content.
EWN contacted Ari Meilich, head of the blockchain-based virtual world project, which, unlike Second Life in the early days of the Internet, can not be closed by a centralized owner.
"Binance has about 10 million users and very popular social accounts – so naturally many new people have started to follow and engage with our project," says Meilich.
"At the moment we are announcing other important cryptography projects for the auction, and the interest continues to rise".
The web client for non-LAND owners to explore the launches of the world in the first quarter of 2019.
The project raised $ 25 million in its initial coin offering last year and attracted investments from Boost VC and Fabric Ventures based in the UK.
BUIDL and will come
Programmers and artists of the 3D world are excited about the opportunities offered by the platform.
One of these is Sam Clare, which was included in a BBC Stories video that is worth seeing, as is an overview of Clare's work below.
"To be honest I did not do anything regarding my Decentraland package I read and I felt comfortable with babylon.js [the project’s SDK was originally using Three.js] and it will build something when DCL is launched, "he told EWN.
At the moment, therefore, Clare is honing her skills in preparation for the launch and is another cryptic world that has her attention.
"I developed mainly on my Cryptovoxels [another virtual world on the Ethereum blockchain] parcels like that are alive and the development for that was recently. I have a fair number of packages.
"You can visit my punk crypto shop on www.cryptopunk.shop and one of my galleries on www.samsplace.space." I also created the BLUP package, the Nintendo 8bit hommage and the Ministry of smiling faces. "
Clare says he will stay with his Decentraland LAND for a while to come or at least until he reaches an estimate of 10 million MANA. He bought his packages for $ 900.
Enjin is on fire
Enjin is a completely different proposition. It is positioned as a one-stop shop for game publishers who want to implement blockchain technology and for gaming communities looking to add value to their ecosystems by exploiting the Enjin network.
The Enjin network has an impressive 20 million users with 250,000 gaming communities on board.
The project has just signed an agreement with Titan Flight Studios where it will integrate Enjin's Ethereum ERC-1155 compatible token into its ReBounce game.
EWN asked Simon Kertonegoro, vice president of marketing at Enjin, when players could get their hands on the product.
"There is no specific launch target, but they have advised us to complete the integration within a month, including the launch of a sale of items and the marketing that follows."
Titan will use Enjin's technology to help it implement what it calls "high speed esports games" for other companies.
Tokens not fungible – from ERC-721 to ERC-1155
At the heart of both Decentraland and Enjin is the ERC-721 standard (NFT) not compliant with the EFT (fungus-compatible) criteria that has taken hold with CryptoKitties.
The popular ERC-20 token standard is fungible, which means that each unit is the same as another and is therefore interchangeable.
Non-fungible tokens are important to the game because each token is different and as such can be used to identify individual differences. In other words, NFTs are essential for the representation of unique objects, whether they are collectible objects from CryptoKitties or other digital objects in game worlds.
Players will immediately appreciate the importance of NFT, but let's face it for those of you who think Discord has to deal with chaos and not a core part of growing gaming communities, along with Twitch.
Purchases and trading in the game are booming
In-game purchases multiply as players launch themselves on the objects used in the gameplay: swords, helmets, blasters, clothes … call him.
And it does not end here. It is also a secondary market in virtual items, with players increasingly looking to exchange their items with other favorite game fans in a niche, if that's the right word, designed to be worth at least $ 50 billion, according to WAX.io. The most expensive virtual object was a virtual planet sold for $ 6 million.
Skins are one of the most ordered virtual objects because they change the appearance of characters in completely unique ways.
Add to that the fast-growing eSports space where players come together to watch the best competitions and the opportunity is even more appealing to the crypto-switches.
Keep track of who owns what, of the origin of a particular object, of tracing its value and of providing a location for trading and other, not only requires a currency but a ledger that records all the above in real time.
In short, the exchange of digital resources in the game is difficult and complicated.
You guessed it, this is where Crypto comes into play.
Statist estimates that by 2020 consumers will spend $ 32 billion on in-game purchases.
Add revenue for mobile devices, PCs and consoles for 2017 together and exceed $ 108.4 billion, according to SuperData, and this does not include virtual reality, augmented reality and eSports.
ERC-1155 – the best of both worlds with fungible and non-fungible
Think about keeping track of all the individual weapons in World of Warcraft (100,000 of them), for example. Some of them are very similar to all the others, but others will have unique characteristics such as strength and health accumulated during many hours of play and so on. Or a character who has perfected. His abilities to overcome ascending difficulty levels.
From a performance standpoint, the storage of all blockchain information may not be efficient, especially when dealing with real-time transactions between multiple players.
For Decentraland it is not so much a problem, at least for the auction.
"Unlike our first auction, there are no offers in this, so at most there will be a total of around 9,350 transactions, which today's Ethereum throughput (half a million per day, approximately) are more than manageable over the course of a few days, "explains Meilich.
Building on packages should not even represent a performance problem.
It's a different matter with massive multiplayer games.
For Enjin ERC-721 it was not good enough so they developed their own token standard – ERC-1155 – which includes both fungible and non-fungible digital resources. It was developed by the co-founder and technical director Witek Radomski, as reported by EWN in July.
The standard is taking off, says Kertonegoro because of his performance gains:
"We have 12 incoming games that have publicly announced their adoption of our instruments after joining our early adopter program (EAP).
"These games are under development and the blockchain is being integrated using our tools as we speak and we have many other games that have registered for our EAP and are getting ready to announce."
Kertonegoro explains that, apart from the creation of websites, the launch of a multifaceted portfolio and Enjin Beam is a QRdrop code system, the heart of the network are its tools for managing properties in the digital worlds.
"The main purpose of ENJ is to be used to create digital resources, it works like a resource / material that is inserted into the ERC-1155 token, guaranteeing access to our tools.
"Most of the existing ERC-1155 tokens are made using our ecosystem and therefore contain Enjin Coin."
The metrics are impressive: "There are 4,722,968 ENJ currently blocked in the articles and we have not yet released our development tools to the public," says Kertonegoro.
"Once we release Unity SDK and our co-marketing campaign with Unity for its 4.5 million game developers, we expect to get a lot more traction," he adds.
It's also a currency and soon we'll get to the gift cards
The Enjin currency has increased in popularity with increasing its value in use.
"ENJ can also be used as currency, which is certainly the most used currency when it comes to buying ERC-1155 peer-to-peer tokens.If you look at one of the following Telegram channels, you will see thousands of transactions that they take place with ENJ as the currency of choice. https://t.me/erc1155_collectibles – https://t.me/catsinmechs – https://t.me/warofcrypto – https://t.me/NineLivesArena– https://t.me/cryptofightsgroup etc."
The lesson here is that the adoption creates liquidity and that's how the projects will survive and prosper – not by excess of promises and therefore by failure to deliver a product.
Enrichingly, Kertonegoro says that ENJ will soon be "a currency of choice on a Gift Card site where users will be able to use BTC, ETH, ENJ and LTC to buy gift cards for over 200 companies such as Amazon, Nike, Uber, iTunes, Google Play etc. "
"We are also working on an agreement to integrate our currency into a cryptographic payment gateway that will allow any online company to easily accept ENJ."
Although we may all have to stop fixing token prices, it is worth noting that most of the altcoins are falling 80-90% or more, not the case of MANA or ENJ.
MANA, currently priced at $ 0.052081, is down 53% against the dollar, but 123% more than BTC and 139% more than ETH, with a one-year horizon.
The relative stability observed in the MANA price table is noteworthy.
In fact Decentraland is one of only 10 cryptographic projects that are down less than 85% this year.
ENJ has a price of $ 0.023361 at the time of writing and is 58% lower than the US dollar, but 105% compared to BTC and 118% compared to ETH.
It is not surprising that Coinbase is considering listing both these coins (MANA has just been listed on Coinbase Pro). Start of the game.
Charts 1-DAY of ENJUSD and MANAUSD, Binance (source: TradingView) Green line = 50 simple moving average (SMA), blue 100SMA, red 200 SMA
