Esther Jade on Enjin's Efinity NFT gaming ecosystem

0:00i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media and today on the Crypto Coin Show we have esther jade the head of ecosystem at engine esther welcome to the show excited to dive into gaming what engine's been working on with effinity and the world of nfts and web 3 just combining for such a crazy experience i feel like it's going to

0:24revolutionize the entire gaming industry and your team is playing a big part in that so let's dive into the discussion but before we start i'd love to hear a little bit about your background in crypto and how you got into this spot working on you know these amazing initiatives of engine yeah so i started out in i actually found engine in 2014 so i was

0:47part of like a gaming community forum so for anyone that doesn't know here engine actually it was established in 2009 and we created a community forum just called engine the engine network and that kind of insisted different community enthusiasts and gaming enthusiasts to join by these community forums and some of these forums could be could be

1:13like minecraft related or world of world of warcraft and that's kind of how i joined i was a gaming enthusiast i love games so and our ceo and our cto are both game fanatics so if you mix gaming and blockchain together you get blockchain gaming so yeah that's kind of how i joined in 2014 really but in 2017 engine created the engine coin

1:38token which is an erc20 token on ethereum and since then that's when i joined engine as a team member and since then i've been working alongside engine pioneering the nft space working alongside some amazing other people as well on the team very cool and great background i feel like a lot of people that are in cryptocurrency used to be avid gamers

2:03and now especially with the introduction of nfts and defy into what's to be known as game fi it's really combining those industries which is great and that didn't didn't really exist back in you know 2014 2016 when engine was there but now the industry's sort of coming to fruition now your job at head of ecosystem i understand that the engine ecosystem is

2:28huge it has all these different moving parts not just specifically with gaming but you know a whole blockchain protocol and more maybe you can talk about the suite of products at engine and then where you're specifically focused awesome yeah so great question so engine for those that don't know engine has a wide range of products we first started out with our engine wallet which is the

2:52way i like to think of it is like a world of nfts directly in your pocket you can easily access all the nfts and tokens and it holds just a wide variety of different features within the engine wallet app we also have our engine marketplace recently we've we've been kind of creating a new developing a new marketplace called nft.io which is just a more

3:17user-friendly it's easier to use it's it holds more features than our current marketplace and we're really excited to get that out there as well in addition to that because we have a we have a wide range of adopters as part of what i do at engine is to oversee our ecosystem growth team and all of the adopters and game developers that utilize engines tech stack as part of

3:40that we also develop software development kits which are sdks so e people and game developers can just plug and play their their project utilizing engines engines tech engines engines api and engine engines sdks as well so we have a lot of them like a lot of products and different services for the end user for those that might be not so familiar with nfts or

4:06with crypto and then we have also products to facilitate those game devs that want to utilize engine in their games so right now i think it's good to touch base on just the different things that we're working at the moment so we're working on a new upgrade of the engine bullet app so the engine wallet app actually has over 2 million installations

4:29worldwide it's one of our most successful products out there but we've realized that over the years and as you probably have noticed as well nfts in general have boomed quite a lot i think every every person or celebrity knows an nft by now so we realize that we need to address the usability aspect of our products and make sure that as i like

4:54to say make sure that my grandma could even use our engine products because if she can use our engine products then anyone can and anyone can just they won't run into any bottlenecks and we want to definitely lower the barriers to entry with using our products so we're working on a new engine wallet app in addition to a new engine marketplace and

5:15our major major thing that we've been working on the past year or so is infinity so infinity is a cross-chain nft highway which i can also go a little bit more into that as well but yeah we've got many things aligned and many things on the roadmap and kind of what i do is as mentioned i oversee our ecosystem growth making sure that we can onboard

5:40users as easy as possible whether that's through dedicating time to them or creating more technical documentation more one-on-ones and content to ensure that they're they're they can use engines tech or api in the most easiest and seamless way possible makes perfect sense esther i believe that it really needs to be as you mentioned you know as easy as

6:05your grandma to use the engine wallet which already has a huge network effect with that two million downloads and i know has been around you know before the evolution of what nfts are they're still evolving of what they will become to get them into the hands of everybody and i'm curious on the integrations that engine has done so far with some of the

6:28games and you mentioned about you know the developer side making the nfts on the marketplace and engine ecosystem easy to connect into the games and vice versa through a wallet out of the game whether to sell buy them sell them or use them in the game i'm curious if you can give any specific examples of you know just for people that are looking to

6:49understand more so about the utility of nfts in the game and how you can sort of extract that value out and use it no a great question so a few examples that we have we have some game studios so obviously engine has been more primarily focused on gaming because our ceo and ct are big fans of games and a few examples to note we have games such as lost relics and kingdom carnage

7:18and nestables that are some of you that i'm going to mention that are using engines tech and the way that they're using engines tech is by using engines api and pulling information and querying information of their players if they have an nft or not so to put it in very simple terms there can be a game where you're in like a dungeon you're doing a quest and you find a sword and that

7:43sword could be an engine nft and that player will have that engine sword it will be transferred from the game devs wallet to the user's wallet and they have themselves a free blockchain digital asset which is playable in that game and we also do this thing where you can have different digital assets but are playable in different games so one item could be

8:06playable in one game and the other one could be playable in the in the other so and the way that kind of boils down into what is the utility is that engine nfts are backed by engine coins so if the user or the player wants to melt down their asset you can get the engine coin from within the nft so if an nft is backed by maybe 10 engine coin then the user can yeah they can

8:35melt down the nft and they get their 10 engine coin directly into their wallet we also have like a lincoln system so game studios like i've mentioned lost relics and kingdom carnage and so forth they link their users wallets to the engines api so easily it's already working together and there's very minimal coding needed to get it all up and running and especially with the

8:59sdks as well we have some such as a c plus plus and c sharp sdk which makes it really easy for game devs to just plug and play and they can start using engines api and they can start creating nfts on the network hopefully yes that answers your question yeah no that sounds incredible to you know not be able to just melt down your item and boom there's

9:22cryptocurrency in your wallet yeah there's obvious value in that and it's great to see that you have some big partnerships already maybe you can give a scope of where you see nfts in the gaming space and on how far engines come so far into partnering with really large games and getting nfts into the hands of millions of players and i feel like there's a

9:50ways to go still until we get to the aaa games that already have millions or tens of millions of players using all using nfts as well yeah exactly so for our soft launch of nft.io our upcoming marketplace we collaborated with entropy universe so entropy universe is an mmorpg they've been in the space for the gaming space for so long i think they're one of the first

10:17mmos out there to have an actual in-game currency as well so what that means is we've collaborated with them for our soft launch to auction off five different eggs which hold utility for entropy players so anyone who acquires one of these eggs through through the auction they will have different benefits from holding the eggs such as affiliate marketing

10:41they receive commission through affiliate marketing of that specific nft in addition to also acquiring like an in-game pet as well in the game so there's we've been working with various different game studios we're planning to get all of our game developers as well on board with the new upcoming marketplace and yeah we've we've also in the past

11:04couple of weeks we've partnered with square enix to create nfts as proof of authenticity for digital items and for also physical items so square enix have various physical items and whoever purchases one of these physical items will also get an nft which just proves that you officially own one of these unique physical items which are very very

11:32rare to get as well so we've got some exciting things coming up and those are just a few of the things that we've that we've got lined up as well much anticipated to see the nft.io marketplace i'm curious on how much emphasis on the growth of the marketplace do you think will drive you know the whole ecosystem we've seen in open sea as you know one of the

11:58biggest nft marketplaces the revenues were higher than ebay you know during the peak of the nft craze last year and it seems to have a network effect where people of all types of nfts are moving them to there i feel like there's a great niche obviously with engine in gaming that you're going to be the marketplace is going to have nfts that are related to in-game items

12:24do you see that as a giant hub for you know games that will start attracting you know through the marketplace to bring more games into nfts yeah 100 i like to think that moving forward we're going to be more very focused with blockchain gaming and that's what the nft new marketplace is going to really show into the future as well

12:50because we also have our game developers with their own games and we will have them on to also utilize nft.io the new marketplace and the way that we see blockchain gaming is it's still very new i think there's we've seen and we've seen just overall in the space there's backlash with without very like hurted players who are very passionate about gaming and we know that

13:18nfcs and gaming have has a bit of controversy so i think that will come within time to get more and more players on board it's not really anyone's mission to solve i think it's just as a community we need to ensure that people are well educated about why nfts work in games and i think one of the reasons that we fall back on mainly our engine is that for example if

13:43a game were to not no longer exist at least if you have your digital items as part of the game you will still always have access to your digital items despite the game maybe no longer being operational so i think it's important for players who spend maybe a hundred dollars on a skin i think it's important for them to truly own that skin because

14:06for me personally i play a few games i try and think i play a few games that do have in-game purchases and when i purchase maybe a skin of some sort i want to truly own that i want to make sure that if that game were to not exist in five years time i want to still hold on to that skin and maybe even transfer it from one game to another so there's definitely growth

14:31i think overall in the whole ecosystem we're seeing that nfts are are the craze right now and d5 was kind of the craze in 2021 and 2020 so we can definitely see blockchain gaming continuing that and even growing more with different with different companies and brands utilizing nfts for their own games but i think it's just a matter of it would

14:53take a bit of time i agree and i'm excited to see that functionality as well anytime you can extract value after putting so many hours into something and you know having been a gamer a decade ago getting almost nothing out of it besides a few tidbits of knowledge yeah not really a lot of value i think it's going to be a world of change for future gamers

15:18now with the engine ecosystem part of it is you know affinity that you spoke about and from what i understand dfinity is actually running on the polka dot substrate ecosystem and that's heading up the nft part is it maybe you can talk about affinity specifically and what's the goal there yeah so i think to provide a bit of context so we've built on polka dot and the

15:43reason why we chose polka dot is because we felt as a team we resonated with what they're doing we resonated with their core values the features that they bring to polka dots such as security and interoperability is unlike anywhere that we've seen with any of the chain i think it's worth to mention that polkadot is still very very new so

16:05infinity itself we won the six paratrain slot in december of 2021 so what this means is polkadot ran power chains for auction where different projects could host these crowd loans and they have player community members to also just provide dot to their crowd loan and with this infiniti won the sixth one and we were officially on the

16:35polka dot ecosystem on in march and one from there we've been building up effinity and ensuring that we can also on board users on there making sure we can also get our game developers on there many features that also lie within affinities such as fuel tanks and governance so some of the features on the parrot chain also share what is on the relay chain and the relay chain is

17:01the main chain of polka dot so some of those features on the relay chain is governance interoperability security and scalability i think one of the main things for infinity as we scale and grow the whole ecosystem and we on board more and more people on board i think it's important to keep scalability in mind and polka dot does that perfectly because we will never run into

17:27issues such as slow pending transactions i think everyone knows that mainnet is very slow and it can be congested at times and the gas fees are too high so we want to give the chance that game developers and players don't have to wait they don't have to wait hours just for a transaction to complete with infinity built on polkadot the scalability just ensures and allows

17:52users that they can have a seamless gaming experience a rich gaming experience some other features as well part of effinity that will drive adoption is the use of fuel tanks so users can and people and game developers can use and hold e5 tokens and they can deposit e5 tokens into fuel tanks which allows players to no longer have to really pay for transaction fees so it becomes a

18:20really easier network to just utilize and manage versus maybe mainnet ethereum or some other chains out there one particular thing why i think polka dot and why we built infinity on polka dot is something i'm very passionate about which is the environmentally friendliness of polka dot we know there's many chains out there proof of work proof of stake that

18:47just use so much energy and in a in a time where global warming is a thing and we're seeing well i'm definitely experiencing the heat where i am so i'm definitely feeling it so with that you we can give users and game devs the ability to mint and distribute nfts on infinity knowing they're not going to really damage the planet in that process which i think is really

19:15important i completely agree and that's great to hear and you're right about the polkadot ecosystem being pretty early on compared to ethereums but as you mentioned there's a lot of benefits for the speed and the cost and the energy efficiency as well are you seeing throughout the nft industry the

19:41companies you know taking a look at these factors as well and being like oh wow we really need to make sure that we have a carbon footprint or that we have this necessary speed if we're going to ramp up the game to a certain size and therefore we should be looking at infinity to partner with yeah exactly especially like big game studios out there if they're getting

20:03If they're getting millions of players every month the first thing you'd want to think about is what he how does that affect the planet and how does it affect what you're doing in a day-to-day basis so with polkadot i think there was a recent chart that came out only a few days ago which showcased poke it up with multiple chains alongside and polka dot was the one

20:26that used 0.1 gigawatts an hour which is the most greenest blockchain out there by far with all of the other proof-of-stake blockchains as well so we know that they're leading in terms of security and we know that they're needing in terms of friendliness environmentally friendliness as well so if you're a game studio and you're seeing a million two million

20:54or whatever high count of players every month you really do want to think about how does that in fact how does that affect the planet i think that should be a cool thing and of course security is one of the main things you don't want to have any any particular hacks or exploits within games and i think security is one of the things i always ensure that people should be looking

21:16into they want to make sure that their games are secure and because this is on the blockchain and as we're moving more into play and earn you don't want any players losing any funds across as they're playing games i think that's a really important thing which we really take pride in because we take security very seriously in addition to other features as well

21:41that infinity holds and provides to our game devs and to our adopters i completely agree and you're right about the security of your gaming account is even more important when there's real world funds attached to it and a lot of value that could be accrued so good to be taking care of those players now you mentioned there about large gaming studios that may be

22:07interested in you know looking into integrations there's so many games yet that have not even really took a step into towards nfts and game fight and also so many millions and millions of players more likely players watching this for those viewers what's the best way to follow along with the games that are integrating with engine and the upcoming nft marketplace

22:35and however else they can learn about capturing some of this value that's being created from nfts and gaming yeah awesome so i think the best way to stay up to date is definitely through like for our social media we are in the process of creating like a big like developer hub so to say on our discord so we're working on that to get anyone whether

23:02you're from a developer background or not to just get started if you're interested in creating a project or a game we can help you with that we were interested in getting you set up but yeah definitely through our social media where we've got some exciting things coming along we've just like i said the soft launch of nft.io the new marketplace

23:23and we're coming up with the new engine wallet as well and infinity which is just i feel like affinity is like the building bricks it's like the missing piece to reject circles are it's it just holds everything together because whilst i'm saying all of this the wallet and infinity will be working and will be supporting affinity it's as well so

23:44if you're if you're a player you can start collecting your nfts on infinity and they'll be directly available in the engine wallet app so yeah we've got some exciting things we're really we're really excited for the future but not just what we do in our engine but also we've we've been collaborating with other power parachain leaders so other paratrain leaders in the space

24:08We've been having talks with them we're really excited because the way that we see it is that we're not all really competing against each other we're all just trying to we're just trying to move the adoption together power chain by paratrain and what i like mostly about what we're doing is each power chain is really doing something different to their own so you probably

24:27have one that's focused on maybe d5 maybe another one focused on maybe infrastructure and then we have like ourselves working mostly focusing on nfts so we really like to collaborate and yeah we want to create those connections and those relationships with both overpowered chain leaders but not also that i think it's important to note that our

24:50community members and our game devs are really the core heart of what we do at engine we're building these products not only just for the end user but also just for our game devs because they're the ones that are that are using engine in their games they're the ones that are facilitating that process to get players on board so yeah it's a it's a

25:09huge effort of collaboration it's parrot chain leaders with game devs with non-game guys with creators musicians artists it's everyone just all on board to see where this goes into the future so yeah definitely check out more like on social media and yeah feel free to reach out whenever incredible esther and one big gaming family i love it i will leave the

25:36description in the description the links that you mentioned there about the socials and the engine and affinity platform for the viewers to easily access thank you so much for your insights into nfts in the world of gaming and how affinity is making it a better greener place for gamers that's exciting to hear all the best with the launch of the

25:57nft marketplace upcoming and let's follow up in the near future yeah likewise really really happy to be here and yeah we'll definitely keep in touch and really excited to see how nft is and gaming goes in the future we've got we're in a really exciting time i know that i'll leave off with this one fact that web free i saw online that web free is estimated to be

26:23a 67.4 million industry by 2026 and i think that just shows that the whole web free and metaverse and blockchain gaming is going to really be the future and it's going to be really exciting to drive that adoption and especially what we do at engine we try and drive that adoption for everyone to get on board incredible thank you no worries you