So with Efinity, we're building a new blockchain, a new parachain on Polkadot,
which is this internet of blockchains,
and what our main goal here is to make it easy, seamless, for people to get on, start using blockchain.
They don't have to go start, you know, buying crypto off exchanges,
do all this complex installing of wallets.
All that stuff will be seamless.
You'll start playing your game.
You'll start receiving your NFTs.
Then when you want to-- if you want to take that and turn that into a cold wallet or, you know,
put it in a hardware wallet, you can do that later on.
But the initial onboarding is going to be completely frictionless.
Hey, guys! Today, I'm excited to be joined by Witek Radomski, the CTO of Enjin,
and then Caleb Applegate, who is the COO of Enjin,
and I believe you guys are both-- made the same roles with the Efinity team.
Today, we're going to be talking about Efinity and its role in, you know, the future of NFTs
and the future of, you know, gaming and how Enjin fits into this.
Just a really exciting conversation.
Guys, welcome to the show today.
- Thank you. - Thanks so much for having us.
Absolutely. So let's-- I guess, let's get started with, you know, we want to talk about Efinity,
but I want to talk about how kind of like Enjin, you know, moved into having this idea to launching Efinity.
Can you just kind of talk about that transition,
where the idea came from and the use case that it's going to fill?
Sure. I mean, we started-- we've actually been around for about 13 years.
So, I'm one of the co-founders.
And we started out, you know, from zero to
basically creating the social network for community building for gamers.
So people would play, you know, World of Warcraft or Call of Duty or Minecraft,
and they build these huge communities that sometimes grew to thousands or tens of thousands of people.
Caleb actually ran one of the communities,
Mineplex,
which is, you know, one of the biggest Minecraft servers in the world.
And we noticed that people started, you know, paying for in-game perks
and things inside of these Minecraft servers and donating to guilds and things like that.
And we realized, "Wow, we could do something a little bit better with this."
When we saw Ethereum coming around, we were like,
"Wow, why don't we give people ownership, true ownership, of their items using blockchain?"
And-- but at that time, nobody was doing NFT.
There was no concept of NFTs.
So we were like, "Let's give game developers the ability to put these items in their games,
give people access to own them,
and then we can build things like a multiverse and go really crazy with creativity."
What about you, Caleb?
Yeah. Well, just piggybacking off of that, I mean, we did it back in 2017.
We built, as Witek said, this multiverse.
And we started what we called an Early Adopter program
where we would bring game developers in.
That's expanded now.
I think, today, we have well over 40 game developers.
In fact, we're jumping into a big group call with them right after this,
where we do monthly updates.
And then, yeah, that's even expanded to just developers in general.
We have apps on our platform utilizing Enjin's tools.
And it is important as we talk about Efinity,
you know, why did we decide to go that direction and build that, you know, on Polkadot.
It's important to understand where we came from.
We've believed in gaming since the very beginning.
This is our DNA.
It's what we eat, breathe, you know, sleep.
This is what we're passionate about.
I've been a gamer for like my whole life basically.
So I've been playing-- I've spent thousands and thousands of hours in MMO or RPG games,
and, you know, just like everything, right?
So I-- my biggest thing is--
I'm really sad that I lost all that history
of when I put those--
I played all those games,
made all those friendships,
collected all these items, built up my characters,
you know, did all this stuff, and it's all lost. Right?
Like, it's all-- maybe the game servers died,
the games are not really being played anymore or things like that.
Accounts got shut down.
And I don't have access to that anymore.
And I feel that was part of my digital identity, right?
And we want to make that something, you know, that lives with people.
- Right. - Yeah.
And I think, you know, when you talked about digital identity,
this is what I think I would say people my age don't really grasp.
And I grasp it. I'm not as interested in it.
And I'm not-- like, I don't play a lot of games.
I'm not going to carry around probably a book that's going to show you my NFTs,
but I get it. I know why people are interested in it.
Like I-- you know how much money I spend on my kids' V-Bucks on Fortnite?
- You know? When Fortnite's out of style, - Same.
you know, every week, it's a new like,
"Oh, this skin, Dad, I've got to have this one. I've got to have this one." You know?
- So, you know. - Yeah.
And they've had some interesting stuff on there, but we lose that,
- you know, when they stop playing the game. - That's right.
You know. But I understand that all this is coming,
and I understand those feelings.
I understand, like, you know, the loss of something you put a lot into,
and it's just gone. It feels like wasted time.
And I think that really is at the core of what you guys are doing.
It's developing a world where everything carries through
and where people will have a digital identity that is just as important as their real identity.
- Yeah. - People are spending so much time online.
- Like, go ahead, kill them. - Yeah.
Well, I'm just going to stay in this world in which we keep talking about.
You know, we started with the multiverse.
We envisioned the metaverse.
It has to have the proper infrastructure.
And that's what we've been laying the groundwork for.
So, at the beginning, you know, we were creating a platform for developers
to create and integrate blockchain assets, these NFTs that we're talking about,
without having to learn how to code.
Now, one of my favorite speakers that I was just recently introduced to by Witek,
Andreas Antonopoulos, I think I'm saying his name correctly,
has said that payments with Bitcoin, Ethereum,
like, they're the currency that is laying the groundwork for density of mass adoption.
Well, we've thought from the very beginning that games are going to be the mechanism
in which density of adoption for the masses is laid for NFTs.
So, in every product that we're building, whether that's our wallet--
and we've got a huge upgrade coming to our wallet that's going to be dropping this October.
We've got NFT.io, which is our new marketplace.
That's coming out mid-September.
We've got our JumpNet network, which is a high-speed bridge network
that allows free instant on-chain transfers of Enjin Coin and ERC-1155 tokens.
And then we've got Efinity, which is coming the end of this year.
And I'll let Witek talk a little bit more about this cross-chain interoperable highway
that we've invested so much time and energy into.
Yeah. Like, I mean, like Caleb said, I mean, the average guy on the street, you know,
he's not really going to be interested in installing, you know, MetaMask
and doing all this blockchain, crypto and numbers stuff, right?
But with games?
I mean, that's a-- people get to play games.
They get to experience it.
They get to feel what it's like to own these things and trade them and do things with them.
I mean, that's, you know, for mainstream adoption, I think that's the most amazing thing.
So with Efinity, we're building a new blockchain, a new parachain on Polkadot,
which is this internet of blockchains,
and what our main goal here is to make it easy, seamless, for people to get on, start using blockchain.
They don't have to go start, you know, buying crypto off exchanges,
do all this complex installing of wallets.
All that stuff will be seamless.
You'll start playing your game.
You'll start receiving your NFTs.
Then when you want to-- if you want to take that and turn that into a cold wallet or, you know,
put it in a hardware wallet, you can do that later on.
But the initial onboarding is going to be completely frictionless.
Wow. I mean that it all sounds good.
I want to go-- I want to touch on before we get--
I want to get into Efinity. I want to get more into that,
but I want to get your opinion on what I think the future of the world looks like
because, you know, here at BitBoy Crypto and Hit Network,
you know, our mission statement is elevating potential to success in the new economy,
and that's because we believe there is a new economy coming.
I think when we look at AI and we look at robots and we look at what Amazon is doing,
replacing workers all time--
you know, Amazon, they say is going to run out of workers to use
because they burn through them so quickly.
You know, we're moving to a place where most people's jobs are going to be obsolete.
And they say, "Well, you're going to need people to manage the robots or manage the AI."
Well, yeah, but you're going to need as many as you need to actually do the jobs.
So I see a world where, you know, gaming becomes so important
that it's actually a giga-- I believe it's going to be over 50% of our entire world economy
as people are going to be, you know, living in that metaverse and making money,
kind of like you saw on Ready Player One,
you know, because we're not going to have jobs to do in real life,
and people are going to have to still do things to make money.
What are your thoughts on that? Is that-- can you see the world going in that direction?
I mean, Yang Gang, right? But, I mean, totally.
I mean, we're going to see that with everything.
I mean, even creative careers.
You know, people think we can be creative. We can be, you know, managing things.
- But AI is going to do a lot of that. - Absolutely.
AI can already write books for you, right? With GPT-3.
AI can create photorealistic images of people's faces.
AI can eventually own crypto as well.
But, yeah, I think that people are going to find new ways to interact.
There's going to be-- I think everyone's always going to want capital.
That's not going to disappear.
I mean, even if, you know, you have this economy
where everyone gets their basic necessities covered for free,
utopia kind of situation,
people are still going to want to, you know, compete.
Gaming is going to be a really good avenue to do that.
And crypto is going to be-- basically, you can't really shut down crypto.
So people are going to use that as long as people are around.
- So I think it's going to be a huge part. Yeah. Definitely - Yeah.
Yeah. People don't understand what's coming.
It's going to happen very quickly. I mean, when you look at 12-- no, not 12.
14 years ago, there was no iPhone.
And you look at how dramatically our lives have changed since then.
And our lives are going to change even more dramatically over the next 15 years.
So, alright. When it comes to Efinity and how it works with Polkadot,
when do you see it actually launching on Polkadot?
- 'Cause you guys are already launched-- - So we--
- We already have an alpha internally that's working. - Got it.
Mainnet is supposed to launch at the end of this year beginning of next.
Oh, wow, that's fast.
Witek, beyond that, I mean, what are you and your team anticipating?
Yeah, so we're for sure going to have our developers, all the early adopters and game developers,
getting early access, you know, around the end of this year,
starting to integrate with their games,
trialing it out.
Now, a lot of depends on the way Polkadot works.
You know, you need to have parachain auctions.
So you have to have a piece of the network.
Basically, every parachain gets a slice of that network,
and then they get to own that security of that network for a certain amount of time if they win the auction.
So we're going to be, you know, competing to win one of those slots.
So a lot will depend on that.
It'll depend on, you know, how many people want to get--
well, who wants to be the first, you know, Polkadot parachain, right?
- A lot of people probably want to be that. - Yeah.
So things will depend on that timeline.
But we're going to be onboarding developers, getting people building their games on that,
you know, around the end of this year.
Yeah. And I don't know. I just covered a story today, the day we're recording this, from my live stream.
Kusama auctions are going pretty well.
Are you guys taking part in those at all? Are you guys just waiting for the--?
We're looking at Kusama as well.
Just to-- I think that we're seeing that both communities are completely different.
Polkadot and Kusama.
Kusama is the experimental NFTs sort of, you know, anarchy kind of interesting aspect.
And then Polkadot, more enterprise, more, you know, huge projects and things like that.
So we're actually starting to get interested in being involved in Kusama.
- We'll have more on that later. - Yup.
So, when it comes to Efinity,
a question a lot of people want to know at all times, right?
People are obsessed with price.
Of course, everyone wants to know what the price of everything is.
But what is the advantage for someone, outside of just price, to buy and hold Efinity?
So, EFI is going to fuel the Efinity network.
So, Efinity network is a bit different than other blockchains.
What it's going to be based on is anyone who wants to be involved with NFTs,
anyone who's bringing value to NFTs,
whether it's creating NFTs, or if you're simply just saying,
"I think this game item is worth X.
I think this shield and sword and piece of armor is worth $100.
I think this thing's worth $200,"
just by doing that, you're providing value to the network,
and you're going to be rewarded with EFI.
That's huge.
Our goal is to actually-- that long tail of items that--
those million NFTs that you see on most marketplaces that no one really wants to buy, right?
We want to actually incentivize people to put a price on those.
- So that's going to be a core part of the network. - Yeah.
People who want to, you know, build, developers building on that,
they're going to receive, you know.
There's a community pool that people can vote.
If they think a project is beneficial for Efinity, they can do that.
If you want to just play games,
do a lot of transactions on Efinity,
do marketplace transactions,
you'll want to hold EFI.
You want to do governance, price discovery, all that kind of stuff.
So you'll be able to stake your EFI on Efinity.
And with Enjin Coin, you'll also be able to stake it to vote for the people who run Efinity.
- So the collator nodes that run it. - Hmmm.
Ben, I think you brought up, was it last week, about EFI.
- And we actually launched on August 4. - Right.
We had a successful launch, very successful.
And prior to that, we had an epic sale with CoinList community sale.
- I think it sold out in like three hours. - Wow.
So a lot of momentum there. And EFI is the fuel for all transactions on the Efinity network.
But it doesn't stop there.
You can actually use it now.
And I think, Witek, if you want to talk about JumpNet for a minute
and like what is it and half like what role does it play.
Sure. So, we started JumpNet as a sort of little sister network to Ethereum.
A lot of people have already built things on Ethereum.
They have smart contracts.
- But they don't want to pay $5+ per transaction to move tokens around in the game. - Right.
So with JumpNet,
the goal here is to become a fully decentralized but ultra-cheap transparent Ethereum network.
And then the three networks, Ethereum mainnet, JumpNet and Efinity,
they're going to be linked together with bridges.
So you can move your tokens to whichever one you think you want to interact with.
If you want to use the Efinity marketplace,
get, you know, price discovery and things there,
you can bridge that over easily.
If you want to use your Ethereum smart contracts
and do those kind of Ethereum operations for super cheap,
you'll want to move it to JumpNet.
- Yeah. - That's exciting.
- No high gas fees. - Yeah.
And you'll be able to use EFI in JumpNet.
- So EFI will actually give you more transactions. - Yup.
You get a portion of the transactions of the network by staking EFI on top of them.
- So it has a utility now. - Yeah.
We love utility. We love utility. That's one reason we love Enjin, we love Efinity.
We love projects that are doing things and not just talking about things.
I think it's important also to note, you know, we don't-- we didn't say this at the beginning,
but, you know, early on, when I started this YouTube channel,
we were talking before we went on air here,
in the very early days of this channel, like, I remember one of my very first news videos
was covering a story about Witek creating token standards.
And we did't even give this-- I mean, this just shows you
the backbone that Efinity and Enjin have.
I mean, you created some of the ERC standards. Which ones exactly did you create?
So the main one is ERC-1155.
That is now supported across most marketplaces,
most NFT marketplaces,
because it's cheaper.
It's actually better in many ways than ERC-721.
You can do batch transfers of 100 tokens at a time.
You can do both fungible tokens and non-fungible.
Sometimes you want fungible tokens,
where you want the tokens all to be the same.
If you're using them in a game, they don't have to be unique
if it's like a, you know, a gem or something, right?
And, yeah, so that became really popular in the Ethereum community.
People loved it.
There's some games now using it.
You know, the Sandbox actually has a dual ERC-1155/721 token.
And now we're also working on a new standard called paratokens.
And that one is all going to be about interoperability on Polkadot and Kusama.
Being able to move those tokens around from Ethereum to Efinity to other networks too.
We're going to open up the doors to, you know, maybe BSC or other places like that.
And you want those--
- You want that item that you own to still be the same thing wherever you move it. - Yeah.
So we need a standard for that, so we're working on it.
Yeah. You don't get much better technical expertise in the world of blockchain
than you do with Enjin and Efinity.
So we're looking forward to seeing how all of this flourishes and develops.
I mean, it's exciting to see we're at the beginning of something new here.
You know, everybody has seen the track record of Enjin
and now watching what's going to happen with Efinity.
I know we're super excited about it. People want to check out NFT.io,
I see that the site is up right now,
if they want to go see what's coming there.
Where else can people learn more about Efinity?
You can check out our whitepaper, Efinity.io.
Efinity.io
And then we're going to be doing a complete overhaul on our website that goes live September 1.
- And that's just Enjin.io. - Sweet.
So, yeah, a lot more simplified, very clear, what we do, why we do it, how we do it, yeah.
- And for developers, - I love it.
we're going to be posting every two weeks a little video update about what's happening,
what's coming down the development pipeline,
what have we built.
So on our YouTube, we'll be posting that or on our blog on Enjin.
Well, we're certainly excited to see how it develops.
Everybody, make sure to check.
We'll have some of those links down in the description for people to see.
This is a project we're invested in. We've been invested in Efinity for quite a while
for full transparency, but this is one we were super excited to get invested in
because we believe big things are coming.
So, to the audience, guys, drop your comments down below.
Let us know what you think about Efinity. What do you think about the future of gaming?
How is it going to fit with the economy? What do you think is going to happen with NFTs?
Go and drop those comments down below.
That's all I got.
Be blessed.
BitBoy out.