Long Beach (CoinChapter): Enjin announced they have raised $19.8 million to build a Polkadot-based blockchain network, especially for NFTs. The network will be known as Efinity and will have its own token called Efinity Token. Enjin CTO Witek Radomski added that the funding was secured by selling EFT Tokens.
The funding round was led by Crypto.com Capital, DFG Group, and Hashed Ventures. Additional participants include BlockTower, Blockchain.com Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, and Arrington XRP Capital among others.
Radomski told The Block, Efinity will be purpose-built for NFTs and is being developed as a parachain on Polkadot. The CTO also added that Efinity plans to resolve the friction points that users and developers dealt with on Ethereum and Flow.
As far as Ethereum-based NFTs specifically, Radomski had some thoughts. He noted that frictions like “transaction fees, the requirement of ether, account security, disjointed applications, problematic multisig security” are around.
Radomski did note that Flow is looking to take care of some of these issues apparent on Ethereum. Additionally, Radomski believes building it from the ground-up, along with their own scripting language, could pose its own challenges.
“Flow may see challenges if they aren’t able to attract enough nodes to become sufficiently decentralized,” the Enjin CTO noted. “And they might also face an uphill battle convincing developers to learn their proprietary language.”
Radomski would also go into detail as to how Efinity differs itself from its competitors. “On Efinity and Polkadot, developers can use Rust which is a well-established language,” he said. “And every parachain will benefit from the combined security of the entire Polkadot network.”
“Finally, each parachain can easily interact with other parachains using XCMP, which creates a powerful network effect.”
Not Enjin’s first foray into the NFT space
This is not Enjin’s first foray into the NFT space as it created the ERC-1155 standard in 2017. That is used by companies such as Nike and Microsoft.
Efinity’s Phase 1 is expected to launch near the end of 2021 or the beginning of 2022.
