Why does a Blockchain Explorer matter to Games?

I’ve never really been one for blogging, but the interest that I’ve developed over the last few years in the misunderstood field of cryptocurrency, as well as the relatively more established field of gaming has given me reason to dust off the ol’ keyboard and bash some words out. Why now? Because essentially, we are approaching a confluence of gaming and cryptocurrency (as well as the blockchain technology that underpins much of Crypto), which could make both fields better. It can make crypto better by demonstrating utility and increasing adoption by orders of magnitude, and it can make gaming better by rewarding players for their efforts, and allowing developers to step away from exploitative monetisation models that form the current status quo. I’m a big fan of a cryptocurrency company called Enjin ($ENJ) that are building a variety of tools and solutions for integrating blockchain into gaming — and one of those tools is a blockchain explorer called EnjinX.

Now, what is a blockchain explorer? As the name suggests, it’s a way to explore the blockchain — to monitor all of the transactions and token holders and blocks mined of blockchain technology. A way to see when cryptocurrencies were transferred from Wallet A to Wallet B, how many different people (roughly speaking) are invested in Project C, and so on. Quite techy, quite dry, and not particularly riveting. So, why does EnjinX matter? Crucially, it’s a way to track digital assets — the primary usecase being game items, characters, subscriptions, etc — that have been minted (or created) on the blockchain.

Next question: Why put an asset on the blockchain, using a cryptocurrency like Enjin Coin? Because it allows data to be imbued with value, and replicate an aspect of tangible, physical goods that gives them value; namely scarcity. Currently, developers can create infinite amounts of any game item out of thin air. A quest rewards that a gamer may have grinded and strategised and sweated for can lose its scarcity from one day to the next if the developers decide to plug another million copies into the game, because there’s no barrier to them doing so. As things stand, gamers don’t really own their digital assets — they pay to access them from games, but if a server goes down or the studio goes bust, everything they’ve worked for in-game can just disappear with nothing to show for it.

By creating assets on the blockchain using the ERC1155 token standard, each individual item must be imbued with some amount of ENJ (or whichever other cryptos adopt the standard). The actual dollar value of this can be negligible, but negligible times one million is still a deterrent against developers trying to flood the market. So scarcity can be preserved, value can be instantly demonstrable, and developers have cool new monetisation models thanks to smartcontracts. Instead of forcing players to buy direct from the developers, players could for example trade on a p2p basis, and the developer benefits because the smartcontract associated with that asset gives the creator of it (i.e. the game dev) a small slice of the price every time it’s traded, like a commission.

So, what role will EnjinX play in all this? Transparency. One of the strengths of blockchain is that it’s open, transparent, and accurate — decentralised networks prevent bad actors from inputting fake data because there’s no single point of failure. Honesty in interactions with players has been lacking lately, as lootbox models proliferate that offer players a shot in the dark at maybe getting the gameplay experience that they’re after — but probably not. We’ve gone from playing games, to being played by them. But as games grow more sophisticated and we invest more and more time and money into them, blockchain allows players to make informed decisions, or to play the game in the way they most wish to do it. Look up a game on EnjinX the same way crypto enthusiasts currently look up tokens, and you could see how many of each item or character there are (so you know you don’t get overcharged), who holds what assets (in the form of blockchain addresses, no need to expose personal information), or what the properties of an item are (based on the metadata that’s uploaded onto the blockchain). Gamers can safely trade with people they KNOW have the items they’re claiming to sell, and protect themselves from item fraud. Superfans can even get themselves HYPE by tracing the provenance of items used by professional streamers — or seeing new assets on EnjinX that have been minted before they’ve been encountered in the wild.

We live in an age where transparency is increasingly important, as large institutions of every stripe demonstrate again and again that they don’t necessarily have our best interests at heart. We need to be able to arm ourselves with reliable information, and EnjinX helps provide that, with a nice, clean, simple UI that means minimal interruption from in-game immersion. So, whether you’re hunting down the components for your favoured Mech build, making sure that an RPG economy is on the up-and-up, or ensuring that your fave streamer did actually pwn all the n00bs with the item they’re offering for sale — EnjinX lets you do it with confidence.