This week, Enjin Coin, a modular blockchain platform centered around tokenized gaming, hit the limelight and saw its ENJ cryptocurrency price acutely surge after reporting indicated, and the project’s leadership confirmed, the Ethereum-based coin play had entered a partnership with international smartphone manufacturing titan Samsung Electronics.
After Samsung announced its crypto-friendly Galaxy S10 smartphone last month, chatter swelled that the phone’s in-built Samsung Blockchain Keystore would support ether (ETH) and ERC20 tokens in the very least. A reveal picture of the Keystore had shown in-app mock holdings of ETH, ENJ, and Basic Attention Token (BAT).
However, Enjin Coin has garnered much more than ERC20 support on the S10, as Enjin’s Vice President of Marketing Simon Kertonegoro later confirmed his team’s partnership with one of Samsung’s biggest arms.
“While I can confirm that we have an official partnership with Samsung, I’m not at liberty to disclose any other information at this point,”
Kertonegoro told CoinDesk.
Specifics on the collaboration are nonexistent for now, then, other than both partners are based out of South Korea and that smartphone tech is all but certain to be central in the team-up.
FOMO Kicks In, ENJ Price Takes a Run
The hearty adoption news led to investors acutely piling into ENJ, lifting the cryptocurrency into the top 40 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization and pushing the ENJ price up nearly 80 percent on the day.
Watching $ENJ is insanity. Been talking about @enjin for 2 years, and never had this project had so much attention.
Lesson learned: Solid tech wins, but boy was it a long 2 years.
Now irrational FOMO is taking over pic.twitter.com/omRyZ440OX— Boxmining (@boxmining) March 8, 2019
In a since deleted tweet, even Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao got in on the clamor. In responding to popular cryptocurrency pundit Boxmining’s comments above, Zhao said, “Congrats to ENJ, solid tech wins.”
- The deleted tweet. Image via Google
In the wake of the partnership’s revelation, Boxmining has been closely tracking rumors and leaks around the ENJ and Samsung mesh and has highlighted how purported images of the S10 show direct support for ENJ and the project’s ERC1155 gaming token standard.
Alright here's what we know so far about $ENJ
* @enjin wallet directly access @SamsungMobile Blockchain Keystore
* ERC1155 support in Samsung Blockchain Keystore
* No known preinstalls (seems like out of control rumor) pic.twitter.com/mbYgbZwO9o— Boxmining (@boxmining) March 8, 2019
The Crypto-Gaming Marriage
A fruitful prospect for token platforms is non-fungible tokens (NFTs), or assets that leverage digital scarcity. And the ability of NFTs to foster new kinds of digital commerce is often put forward as an example of how cryptocurrencies can add novel and innovative dimensions to the booming gaming industry.
The Enjin program, then? To streamline tokenization in gaming by making it easier and more efficient to create NFTs than existing ERC standards allow for.
“ERC-1155 takes a new approach to defining tokens,” Enjin co-founder Witek Radomski said in 2018. “Items are now stored in a single contract with the minimum possible amount of data needed to distinguish the token from other ones. The contract state contains configuration data per Token ID and all the behavior governing the collection.”
In this context, Samsung’s apparent embrace of Enjin isn’t necessarily surprising. The eSports scene has exploded in South Korea and beyond in recent years. In collaborating with Enjin, Samsung has positioned itself to make penetrations into the cryptocurrency and gaming markets, both of which could see further explosive growth yet over the next few decades.
Your Alts Are Coming Back in Style
When the cryptoeconomy reached its peak bleakness in 2018, even major and positive news stories didn’t seem to move crypto prices up, if at all.
Things have looked a little bit different in 2019, though, as a few alts have seen some recent momentum — enough momentum to have more traders wondering if the bearish cryptoeconomy is beginning to turn bullish.
Some of the bigger movers so far this year have been litecoin (LTC) and Binance Coin (BNB). Smaller projects that have done well more recently have been ENJ and ChainLink (LINK), a decentralized oracle middleware project. Whether these price runs are just blips amid a wider bear market remains to be seen, however.