Enjin’s NFT Marketplace Efinity Rakes In $20 Million From EFI Token Sale on CoinList

Enjin successfully auctioned all tokens available for sale for the new Efinity NFT marketplace it has developed for the Polkadot ecosystem.

Latest Sale Brings Total Marketplace Funding to $38.9 Million

Given the concerns about Ethereum’s high costs and sluggish transaction throughput, competition amongst NFT marketplaces is heating up fast. More platforms are launching daily to keep up with demand and new use cases for NFTs.

As more blockchains compete for the torrent of demand for non-fungible tokens, Enjin has become the latest to launch another marketplace. Enjin, the team behind the ERC-1155 standard, has concluded a $20 million public sale of EFI tokens on CoinList for its next-generation Efinity blockchain. The oversubscribed sale ran for just 2.5 hours, and added to the already garnered $18.9 million from an earlier sale.

Efinity aims to tackle Ethereum’s many pain points, namely high gas fees and low throughput by constructing a blockchain marketplace capable of handling 1,000 transactions per second with six-second transaction confirmation. Built on Substrate, Efinity plans to leverage Polkadot’s interoperability for handling transactions in fungible and non-fungible tokens from Polkadot, Kusama, Ethereum, JumpNet, and nearly any other chain.

The multifunctional EFI token will play multiple roles within the ecosystem, including governance, staking, rewards, and paying transaction fees. It can also be applied to Enjin’s JumpNet, a gas-free blockchain, to increase transaction limits. It echoes other developments that Enjin has pioneered, like the ERC-1155 standard.

Unlike the standard ERC-721 non-fungible token (NFT) used to represent the original version of a piece of art, music, or video, the ERC-1155 standard can be both a fungible and non-fungible token simultaneously and is applied to more commoditized products, like popular in-game items that are collected, won, or traded.

A Race to Marketplace

Efinity is far from the only new blockchain marketplace to make its debut as other competing platforms enter the race to become NFTs’ winner-takes-all destination. Binance recently unveiled its own Binance NFT Marketplace late in June, Stellar blockchain hosts StellarNFT, and Solana features Sollectify. Tezos is now home to Hit Et Nunc and even Rarible has expanded to the Flow Blockchain after raising fresh capital.

These are in addition to the dozens of existing marketplaces that cater to different niches within the NFT space and the others that will arise as new use cases for NFTs emerge over time. However, given the vast incentives within the marketplace model, a fight for market share could unfold as new, more scalable, low-cost frameworks enter the ecosystem.