Enjin Coin is a cryptocurrency for virtual goods created by Enjin. Enjin is the “largest gaming community platform online” with over 250,000 gaming communities and 18.7 million registered gamers. The Enjin team is designing the coin completely around gaming with the goal of it being the most usable cryptocurrency for the industry. The project includes the Enjin Coin as well as a suite of software development kits (SDKs) that developers can integrate into their games and communities. Bringing blockchain to gaming helps to reduce the high fees and fraud that’s prevalent in the transfer of virtual goods. Enjin Coin is an ERC20 token built on the Ethereum network. With that, the project not only acts as a cryptocurrency but also has smart contract capabilities. It’s also one of the first projects testing the Raiden Network, Ethereum’s version of the Lightning Network. The Enjin Coin platform provides a laundry list of features through its public API and SDKs. To keep things brief, though, we’ll only be discussing a few of the major ones in this article. The largest value Enjin Coin brings to the gaming community is in its creation and management of virtual goods. Developers on each platform can easily create a currency unique to their community that’s backed by Enjin Coin as the parent currency. This gives the coins all the benefits of the blockchain (speed, cost, security, etc…) while still staying customized to their respective platforms. Enjin, the company behind Enjin Coin, is the largest online gaming community creation platform. Started in 2009, the company receives 60 million views per month and transacts millions of U.S. dollars each month in their community stores. The team is deploying Enjin Coin across the entire Enjin CMS platform – over 250,000 gaming websites. Advisors to the project consist of Anthony Diiorio (Ethereum co-founder) and Pat LaBine (previous producer and technical director at Bioware). Enjin has also formed partnerships with Unity, PC Gamer, and NRG eSports. The team held a successful ICO in late 2017 in which they raised ~$35 million between the private and public rounds. Although it’s still a young project, the team spent the last quarter of 2017 building the Platform API, Mobile Smart Wallet, and a Java SDK alongside creating a Minecraft plugin. They’ve got plenty in store for 2018, but the highlights include various platform plugins, the Efinity release, and numerous other SDKs. Enjin also features a tool known as TopLists, which allow users to rank games, servers, teams and any other item. TopLists will be deployed as a decentralized smart contract with functionalities that will allow for market bidding or democratic voting. List creators are incentivized to promote and market their list because these creators will receive tokens when users perform tasks such as voting on their list. Enjin Coin is an ambitious project that aims to integrate online virtual gaming with decentralized technologies. Enjin Coin project promises a lot, and it is only with the passage of time that we will able to see if it can deliver on those promises.
Stratis is a powerful and flexible Blockchain Development Platform designed for the needs of the real world financial services businesses and other organisations that want to develop, test and deploy apps on the blockchain. Stratis significantly simplifies the development process for creating Blockchain applications and accelerates the lifecycle for Blockchain development projects. Stratis private chain allows businesses to deploy their own customise blockchain without the costs of running their own blockchain network infrastructure. The vision of the Stratis platform is to become a one-stop shop for all blockchain things, mostly becoming a blockchain-as-a-service (BAAS) platform. Technology-wise, it is a clone of Bitcoin’s core code, with a few enhanced features and written in C# language instead of C++. The team is based in the United Kingdom but has a decentralized structure with members spreading across the world. Several people on their management team are well-versed in enterprise software development using .NET and C# – a positive sign considering those are the project’s two primary languages. Chris Trew, the founder and CEO, has over 10 years of experience in enterprise IT and was a volunteer developer for the Blitz project. Stratis is competing against other BaaS projects in an increasingly saturated but gigantic space. Lisk may be the largest direct competitor in offering sidechains for businesses. However, Lisk is written in Javascript (not C#) and has sidechains that are more publicly available. The decreased privacy may be a turnoff to corporations looking to keep their code proprietary. The company held an ICO in June 2016 and manage to raised 915 Bitcoin.