Throughout history, there have been attempts to create a lingua franca, a universal language. Some were more well-meaning than others. All have failed.
Some attempts make progress through might and colonization, such as English, the most successful so far. Others are organized efforts to increase trade, like Esperanto.
But it turns out that for all the forces trying to make language uniform, there are other forces modifying language, innovating, and making it new again.
That’s the situation that blockchains, cryptocurrencies, and NFTs find themselves in right now. For all the efforts to unify, more projects keep popping up that want to move fast and break things. “Web 3.0” technologies promise advances in finance, real estate, governance, gaming, art, and more. But these systems are isolated—which is what Efinity, a new blockchain build on the Polkadot network, will solve.
It also solves another problem: Ethereum, the blockchain that most blockchains are built on top of, is clogged. Transaction speeds, fees, and energy usage are all big concerns. It grew faster than its creator ever guessed. It is, to quote the immortal wisdom of modern prophet DJ Khaled, suffering from success.
When Efinity launches towards the end of 2021, these scalability and interoperability problems will melt away. There won’t be a universal language of blockchains. But there will be a universal translator.
Ethereum isn’t alone in not being able to handle global demand. No one blockchain can.
Increasingly, the conversation around blockchains is less about which one will “win”, and more about how we can bridge them together. Just like there isn’t one credit card or one bank or one telecom, there won’t be One Chain to Rule Them All—so now we need to figure out how they can talk to each other.
In a space where bridges are now paramount, Polkadot is a city of bridges. It’s the Pittsburgh of blockchains. It’s your hub world, connecting you to all the parachains.
Polkadot has engineered its hub world to support 100 different portals to different blockchains, called “parachains”. It’ll be easy for these 100 networks to talk to each other, sending currency, information, digital assets, and whatever the community deems worthy.
The community has the final say on that, too. By using their Polkadot tokens (DOT), they can vote on which parachains should get a slot.
Polkadot is now running near-weekly auctions to see who gets these slots, and users can loan their DOT to a project as part of a “crowdloan.” The DOT commands the slot—if you can put forward more of the token, you win.
That brings us to Efinity.
While most of the existing projects in the first batch of auctions are finance-related, we feel strongly that the interconnected blockchains—and indeed the world—needs an updated network for sharing digital assets.
So we took a page out of the Book of Khaled, and made “another one.”
Efinity will consume approximately 4,060,000,000,000 watts per year, which is ~0.15 of the electricity used by Ethereum. Due to its PoS infrastructure, Efinity's carbon footprint will not increase even as it becomes more popular and the network's value rises.
Crucially, you can transfer assets between blockchains with ease. Transfer NFTs from Ethereum, Enjin, or the Polkadot/Kusama ecosystem, and more. Bid on marketplace items across blockchains.
It’s the Internet of (Digital) Things. The Babel fish of digital assets.
In its current internal alpha, Efinity is capable of millions of millions of token mints and transfers per block. That means large-scale games serving millions of users can instantly start using Efinity as soon as it’s a Polkadot parachain.
Efinity solves the known knowns, and the known unknowns. It’s scalable and upgradeable. It’s future-proof. It’s effectively a new cross-chain standard for tokens, just like Enjin’s ERC-1155 became the standard for NFTs on Ethereum.
It’s not all about tech, though. Over the course of years and making tools used by over 80 projects, Enjin has also learned a thing or two about what drives adoption.
The first few minutes is everything. Whether a user is playing a game, reading a website, or watching a trailer, there’s only one first impression.
Right now, across the crypto gaming space, we’re failing the user. We’re bungling that first impression.
It’s all too common to load up a blockchain-based game and be hit with a wallet connector, regardless of if the user has a wallet or has ever delved into crypto at all. It literally throws up a barrier to entry—often before the player has even seen what the game looks like, or what kind of game it is.
That’s the kind of thing Efinity fixes. The Discrete Accounts feature means players can just jump in. They might not even know there’s a blockchain under the hood. If they want it eventually, it’ll be there.
No need to buy cryptocurrency before you even learn the game’s rules, Efinity’s Fuel Tank feature takes care of that.
All that crypto stuff like staking, governance, and liquidity? It’s all done automatically just by having your items on Efinity and using the service. You get the benefits without thinking about it.
Ultimately this takes NFT and crypto gaming to where it needs to be—not thought of as an investment opportunity, but thought of as fun. Those will be the games that last. Those will be the games that drive adoption like we’ve never seen before.
Supporting Efinity is a suite of tools and apps that Enjin has been working on for years.
There’ll be a wallet to house all your in-game items and other NFTs. That wallet will tie into a new marketplace called NFT.io, as well as marketplaces on other blockchains like OpenSea or Rarible.
That makes it easy to list, buy, trade, or simply show off NFTs, no matter what blockchain they’re on. But once it’s won a parachain slot, the incentives are so strong it’s hard to imagine NFT holders not bringing their items to Efinity anyway.
As of Batch 2 in Polkadot’s parachain auctions, Efinity has officially won a parachain slot. A big congrats and thank you goes out to everyone who contributed to make this a reality!
If you hold DOT, and care about the future of NFT gaming, as well as what a future metaverse might look like, we’d be grateful and humbled if you chose to support us in the parachain auctions.
While the crowdloans offered rewards, we see it as much more than that—it’s a vote for the type of world you want to live in. We'll continue building that world, and EFI token holders will govern it.
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