The metaverse, games, and NFTs are some of the most exciting topics right now, and they are driving some exciting innovations in and around the blockchain space.

To understand why Mark Zuckerberg sees the "metaverse" as the next frontier, look at how Enjin co-founder and CTO Witek Radomski is pursuing his path in the blockchain space through the metaverse and games.

Witek Radomski is not only the co-founder and CTO of Enjin, but also the author of ERC-1155. ERC-1155 is an advanced Ethereum token standard that enables developers to deploy fungible or non-fungible projects in a single smart contract.

On November 16, Cointelegraph Chinese hosted the online ace interview column Focus, and invited Enjin co-founder and CTO Witek Radomski to participate in this interview "From NFT to Metaverse, How Enjin Plans for the Future".

Through an interview with Ting, the Chinese editor-in-chief of Cointelegraph, the audience learned how Witek Radomski founded Enjin, his views on the future development of the Metaverse, and his predictions for the future of the encryption industry.

Guest's wonderful views:

1. As humans, we have a responsibility to try to build the metaverse in a decentralized and fair way. There are various factions of blockchain, some want finance to work one way, some want to work another way, which is why we have so many chains.

2. The establishment of a decentralized metaverse requires a variety of truly usable blockchains around NFT, including a general smart contract platform and a very good transaction system. We need something that benefits people who just want to develop and use NFTs, it has to be cheap, easy to use, and make it simple to run millions or even hundreds of millions of NFTs.

3. Enjin's vision is to bring people together and build in the right way, which is going to be a lot of fun. We can compete with each other in a future world where there is artificial intelligence and there are parties representing all kinds of different interests.

The following is the content of the interview organized by Cointelegraph in Chinese:

Ting: Please introduce yourself.

Witek: Enjin has actually been around for a long time, more than 13 years. We first started in the game field, built a social network and website building platform for gamers, the platform has attracted as many as 20 million users, there are people who play various popular online games, such as "World of Warcraft", "Final Fantasy" And "My World", formed a group. To that end, we provide some tools to get them into the game. Enjin took off and became very popular among gamers, with a community of 250,000 and hundreds of different games using these tools.

We started looking at blockchain because we realized that people would have a lot of problems with ownership, games would be taken down, players would lose everything, servers would go down, and users would lose their stuff. We realized that this was a very interesting opportunity to establish a new paradigm in gaming where people could use the blockchain to truly own their items. So we started writing some code, we started working with Ethereum in 2017, we launched one of the first NFTs in the world, made the first NFT platform for game developers to integrate tokens into their games. Fast forward to now, we released ENJ, which is very popular with community adopters and game developers, and at the same time, we have cooperation with Microsoft, Samsung, and many other companies. But now we realize that there is a novice use and mainstream adoption problem, and we find that game developers are afraid to use this technology, and it is difficult and expensive to use Ethereum. To solve this problem, we started building Efinity.

Ting: Is this the main challenge that NFT is currently facing?

Witek: Yes. There are a lot of obstacles, a lot of friction. As a gamer, if you want to play a game, you want to play the game directly on your mobile phone, tablet, console, or computer, instead of having to install an encrypted wallet, back up the mnemonic, and enter the game before playing the game. Exchanges buy cryptocurrencies before you can play the game. We realized that a new blockchain had to be built to solve these problems, and it could cost $10, $20, or more just to transfer an NFT.

Guiding new users is a big problem. Users don't want to install things like open source wallets, and they don't want to do complicated things like backing up mnemonic words. When you start asking users to do that, you lose 95% of your players, and we want that experience to be a truly modern one. When you start playing the game, receive items, and you can start leveling up, you don't even know that the blockchain is being used in the background. When you want to have ownership, you can install a wallet, hang your identity, and then you can own these items forever and become part of your digital identity. Everyone enters this ever-growing digital metaverse. Facebook said they wanted to be part of the Metaverse because they knew this was the future of digital interaction. We want the decentralized cryptocurrency space to be super easy to use.

Ting: You are the author of ERC-1155, what inspired you to develop this standard?

Witek: I started to pay attention to Ethereum in 2017, and I found that the tokens developed by people are all homogeneous. ERC-20 is the first standard developed just for currency. We were like, can we use ERC-20? We didn't see any way to use it for game projects, there was no ERC-721 at the time, some people made some extensions to ERC-20, but it was still early in the development, and we thought, what does the game need, business What is needed, what is needed by the supply chain, they may need some non-homogeneous things, they may need some unique collectible NFTs. We're also constantly looking for ways to make this efficient.

You definitely don't want to be able to send only one NFT at a time. Imagine if you go to a grocery store to buy apples, bananas and meat, and every time you check out, you have to swipe your card for each item, which is very troublesome. In our standard, it allows you to transfer a whole batch of tokens at once, and you can also make any kind of tokens you want, we spent a year with the entire Ethereum community to establish this standard, we are based on Hundreds of comments have improved this standard, making it super scalable, and now major markets in the world support ERC-1155, which is the most efficient standard.

Ting: You mentioned the new NFT blockchain Efinity earlier, can you tell us more about how it works?

Witek: Of course, we built Efinity on Polkadot. Polkadot is a next-generation parallel chain developed by Gavin Wood, who is also one of the inventors of Ethereum and the co-founder of Ethereum. He wrote the solidity programming language for smart contracts, and all smart contracts use this programming language. Five years ago, he started developing Polkadot because he realized that there would be a lot of friction and problems, and he saw a vision for the Internet of Blockchains.

What's cool is that Polkadot can have all the different blockchains, with specialized features. You can have a blockchain focused on DeFi, you can have a blockchain focused on NFTs. That's what we're building at Efinity, we're building a chain that embeds NFTs natively into its structure. In fact, anyone can develop a marketplace on Efinity, anyone can become part of the network, and even get rewarded for predicting the price of an item. By joining this network, you will truly be rewarded.

Efinity is really focused on NFTs, it's focused on making them easy for game developers, easy for players to use them. We're working with Parity to build this project with the people who built Polkadot. We're going to launch a parachain and it's exciting to be part of this ecosystem. We are doing Alpha internal testing, Efinity will be a fully interoperable parachain, it will work with Ethereum, it will work with Binance Smart Chain, it will work with any chain that wants to connect to Efinity, it will Become the highway of NFT.

Ting: Will the NFT oracle machine become the next trend in the NFT market? Can you share with us the future trend?

I don't think Efinity is an oracle, but it's kind of like a fully decentralized super oracle that helps people determine the price of NFTs. It is completely market based. You can say, I believe this is worth X dollars, and someone will say I believe this is worth Y dollars, but they have to be willing to buy the thing at that price, and that will incentivize everyone to price things in the market. All these game items, no one really knows their value, most of these items in the market have no sales records, people can solve this problem by predicting the price of items. So I think we're going to lead the way because we're noticing this, it's going to be used in games, people want to use these features in games.

Ting: What is your vision? Personally, how do you see the Metaverse developing in the future?

Witek: As humans, we have a responsibility to try to build the Metaverse in a decentralized and fair way. Blockchain is like politics, there are all kinds of factions, some want finance to work one way, some want to work another way, that's why we have so many chains. Even within Bitcoin, there are different factions competing with each other. Facebook is building a centralized metaverse, and they will be an important part of the metaverse.

I think we also need a decentralized metaverse. Because obviously, people want freedom, people want to make their own decisions, and they don't want to be banned from making a game that the app stores don't agree with. Is it right? As we have seen recently, Steam banned NFT, no one can launch blockchain games on Steam now, that's why decentralization is so important. People need autonomy, gamers need to be able to participate in the Metaverse on their own terms, because at the end of the day, that's the user's personal identity and assets, it's the player's character and game history, and the time spent in those games.

Ting: People need to be decentralized and truly have freedom, so you think the Metaverse should be decentralized?

Witek: Of course, it must. There is a saying: Metaverse should be decentralized.

Ting: What technologies are needed to build a decentralized metaverse?

Witek: I think that a truly usable core blockchain around NFT should be established. There are various blockchains, including general smart contract platforms and very good transaction systems. We need something that benefits people who just want to develop and use NFTs, it has to be cheap, easy to use, and make it easy to run millions or hundreds of millions of NFTs. Another need is user experience, we want it to be extremely easy to use. I think people who bring it to users in a clear way, with a nice wallet, a nice marketplace, a product that's really easy to use for developers, will appeal to a lot of people. That's what we're trying to do at Enjin.

Ting: What is your user acquisition strategy? How do you move them from layer one solutions to Efinity, the NFT blockchain you're building?

Witek: Our strategy covers many things. First of all, we're an ecosystem where we're bringing in companies, game developers, guys who are making games that people actually want to play, and they're going to bring their users. Ecosystem construction is huge, and this is what our team focuses on.

You may have a CryptoKitties on Ethereum, you may have Binance or other things on the chain, this is a cross-chain behavior. Efinity has cross-chain interoperability, rather than locking people in a four-walled garden, which is very critical, it's about people's identities. We try to give users complete control over their identities. They can bring items to the chain they want. We will establish open standards to work with all parachains and blockchains to make this happen, and that will be key.

Ting: I'm curious, you said cross-chain is possible. I understand that your next step is to connect your platform with OpenSea so that traders who list NFTs on Solana can also trade other NFTs, is that right?

Witek: Yes, we hope that Efinity can achieve cross-chain operation, and we hope that it can be applied to all NFT formats, especially ERC-721, ERC-1155, and ERC-20. We have prepared a token standard, which is basically the same as All NFTs are compatible. So you can develop a token on Efinity and then list it on OpenSea, you can list it on any market you want, and people have the flexibility to do what they want.

Ting: Can I see Efinity as a launch platform for NFT projects?

Witek: You can think of it this way. It's actually the web that people use. If you want to create a game, you don't want to develop a blockchain. Game developers have enough going on, and I'm talking about real game developers, they make first-person shooters, RPGs, mobile games, etc., and they need something that works. Therefore, our philosophy of developing Efinity is to allow users to quickly join, easily create projects, and create tokens. If they want to extend it, they can leverage the smart contract language to build extensions, such as custom functions.

Ting: Who is your biggest competitor in the market?

Witek: We are quite unique. For a long time, the value we provide has not been found in many chains. What we have is a long-term vision, and we're trying to do a lot of things. We're building the gaming ecosystem, I could list a whole bunch of names, all kinds of categories, including gaming metaverses like decentralized lands and all kinds of people, and things like Polygon and Immutable Layer 2 scaling schemes and all those trying to develop outside of Ethereum. They all have some problems, layer choice is limited by Ethereum, limited by smart contract design. We think the idea of smart contracts is great for developing interesting new ideas and interesting new cryptocurrency applications, but it doesn't work very well when you're trying to build super efficient highway NFTs, you have to do Many things, such as installing wallets, passing approvals, and using smart contracts are extremely costly. All the resources are competing on-chain for approval, and you're locked into the way smart contracts work, and even if the second-layer protocol makes it cheaper, they'll still be locked into Ethereum.

Some of the other competitors are developing their own programming language, Polkadot has the advantage of built-in Rust language, there is a huge developer community, every program I know loves developing Rust language and wants to develop Rust language as much as possible, It is also building the Internet network of the entire blockchain, which is already a community and an ecosystem.

As we have seen parachains launched on Polkadot. I think we're in a very unique position, we have a lot of experience in the blockchain space, and we're always coming up with interesting new ideas that game developers want to use, and we use their feedback to refine our product.

Ting: Many projects are also built on Polkadot. Will this affect your launch of Efinity on Polkadot and the entire ecosystem?

Witek: The Polkadot ecosystem is really cool. The above projects all appeared a long time ago. They are very nice people. We talked to them and they will help us review the upcoming Paratoken standard.

On Polkadot, each parachain must compete in the auction for a spot on that relay chain. We competed in the first batch, we wanted the fourth slot and we will do our best to get the fourth auction.

In fact, I was talking to people from other chains earlier today, and a whole bunch of people are competing to auction off various slots. As the first NFT highway on Polkadot, this means a lot to us. We have made a lot of contributions, we have a huge community, we have hundreds of thousands of users on Twitter, hundreds of thousands of users hold our tokens, millions of users are using the Enjin wallet, we have a large number of resources are available.

Ting: You announced the $100 million Efinity Metaverse Fund, what is this fund for, and what are your expectations for this funding?

Witek: We want to get interesting and unique projects, so we set up this fund. I know a lot of needy developers who need some starting capital to build a lot of interesting stuff, and our team will talk to a lot of projects in the space, and games that didn't even think about blockchain. We'll say, you know, this game looks like it could use blockchain, we have a fund. How about working with us? We will provide development support, provide funding, attract them into the Enjin ecosystem, and we will actively promote this work in the next year.

We built the technology, we spent four years building all these tools for the end-to-end experience, and now it's time to open the floodgates and let all the projects come in. We're already talking to a lot of organizations, big games, big enterprises that are going to use this parachain.

Ting: The last question is, what is your prediction for this industry?

Witek: After the outbreak of the new crown, we started to spend more and more time online, which I thought was impossible before. But that's how we do it now. Games are moving faster than ever, we spend a lot of time on our devices, our digital identities. Even when using social networks, it's your digital persona. It's even worse if you count the time spent on social media, which can affect your livelihood as well as socialize. We need decentralization because people need control, people need to be able to control at least their digital persona.

We will see the emergence of VR devices, more and more VR and AI devices are easy to use, no longer frame yourself in a virtual world, and cannot see anything around you. Instead, put on virtual glasses and you can see your notifications, see your transactions, everything you're doing, and interact with the real world. There will be better voice assistants in the future, better artificial intelligence, and every aspect of our lives will become digital. There will be many brands, and many different brands and businesses will need this integration. They're abandoning traditional systems because they realize that people need NFTs, they want to represent digital, whether it's physical objects that they buy, whether it's fashion, video games or sports, these will become digital in the next 10 or 15 years. We're going to see it take over the world, and we want to help in a responsible way, with many people working in different directions.

Our vision is to bring people together and build the right way, which is going to be a lot of fun. We can compete with each other in a future world where there is artificial intelligence and there are parties representing all kinds of different interests. You will still have your digital persona, retain your digital identity.

Ting: We put a lot of data on a centralized platform, how will the decentralized Metaverse solve the privacy and data protection issues?

Witek: I have had this experience myself. Like I said, I've been playing games since I was a kid, and I've been playing a lot of old online games from twenty years ago or even earlier, all of which are now completely off the shelves, all that time , those friends I have, those characters I build, even if it’s just for the nostalgia factor, I would love to have those now, they are my time, my identity, my past. I am part of the social network.

But all these things have been erased and deleted, and it's really important for people to preserve this history forever. We've seen a lot of different centralized platforms and a lot of decentralized platforms where people can share interesting things. With blockchain, people can do things the way they want, that's what people need, that's what people want, and I'm excited to be a part of that.