Enjin Coin

Maxim Blagov and Witek Radomski founded Enjin Network in 2009, long before NFTs had a name. The company says its tools for gaming communities eventually served 20 million users.

That background shaped the later blockchain project. Enjin was not trying to create a general-purpose currency first; it wanted game publishers to issue items that players could hold outside a single game database.

In 2017 it launched ENJ as an Ethereum ERC-20 with a fixed supply of one billion. Creators could lock ENJ into digital items, giving the token a job inside the product rather than merely attaching it to a brand.

Witek Radomski led the ERC-1155 proposal in June 2018 with several co-authors. The standard allowed one contract to manage fungible currency-like units, repeated items and unique NFTs together, including batch transfers.

After more than fifty revisions and public discussion, ERC-1155 reached Final status in June 2019. It became shared Ethereum infrastructure, so its importance no longer depended on whether users stayed inside Enjin’s own wallet or marketplace.

Enjin’s original mint-and-melt design joined ERC-1155 to ENJ. A creator could embed a stated amount of ENJ in every item, and a holder could destroy the item to recover that reserve.

The mechanism created a choice rather than a promise of appreciation. Melting sacrificed the item and any game utility attached to it; keeping it meant accepting the publisher, marketplace and liquidity risks around the collectible.

The same distinction remains important today. ENJ inside an asset can be redeemable while the artwork licence, server access and demand for the item remain entirely separate.

By 2021, Ethereum gas costs made frequent game rewards difficult. Enjin answered with JumpNet, an Ethereum-compatible proof-of-authority network where a bridge moved ENJ and ERC-1155 assets for fast, sponsored transactions.

JumpNet improved the user experience by accepting a more concentrated validator model. It was a bridge-era solution, and Enjin later chose to retire the network instead of making it the permanent home of the ecosystem.

The next answer was Efinity. It launched on Polkadot on 11 March 2022 with its own EFI token and a parachain designed for cross-chain NFT activity.

That architecture added another community, token and migration path to a product suite already spanning Ethereum and JumpNet. The cost of expansion was fragmentation: users had to know which representation, bridge and chain a game expected.

In June 2023, Efinity governance approved a different direction. The parachain would become the first Matrixchain of a new Enjin Blockchain, and EFI would be folded into ENJ.

Enjin Blockchain launched on 13 September 2023 with a Relaychain for validation, staking and governance and a Matrixchain for assets and marketplace operations. It began with 1.75 billion ENJ: one billion reserved for ERC-20 claims, 500 million for EFI conversion and 250 million for early incentives.

This migration changed ENJ’s monetary story. Legacy ERC-20 ENJ had a fixed billion; native ENJ documents 5% annual inflation for security rewards. On 5 September 2026, Subscan reported about 2.01986 billion native ENJ, a live issuance figure rather than a permanent ceiling.

The December 2023 asset snapshot and 2024 JumpNet shutdown closed the bridge chapter. Legacy Ethereum ENJ can remain where it is, but moving to native ENJ is irreversible and required for the new chain’s staking and governance.

Enjin restored infusion on the native Matrixchain in September 2024 and placed asset creation, royalties, trading and fee sponsorship in protocol modules. The product idea from 2017 survived, but now validators, governance, runtime upgrades and funded Fuel Tanks determine whether the surrounding system keeps working.