What is an NFT?
Learn more about NFTs and the importance of NFTs to our ecosystem.
The term tokens refer to a digital currency or how cryptocurrencies are defined in a specific blockchain environment/project. A token represents a set of rules encoded in a smart contract and belongs to a specific blockchain address, a great example of blockchain tokens would be ETH (Ethereum) and BTC (Bitcoin). In the context of the Enjin Platform, our main Tokens are Enjin & Efinity, which are used to power up our environment and make sure our vision and mission come to fruition.
NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) are unique digital assets created on the blockchain. They can be everything from gaming items to digital art, to sports collectibles and real-world assets. NFTs are based on a concept of true ownership, where your asset is stored in your blockchain wallet address and no one would be able to take it from you. NFTs can be used in apps, games, websites and even real life, the limit to its usage is based on the imagination of the NFT creator. Every NFT is unique, which means that every NFT is different and this is where the non-fungible meaning comes from.
Fungible Tokens (FTs) are blockchain assets replaceable by another identical item; they are mutually interchangeable. Gold coins, mana gems, and resources like iron, stone, and wood are fungible . One gold coin is equal to another gold coin; one piece of iron is the same as another piece of iron. These assets are identical, in terms of NFTs, the logic would be the complete opposite, where NFTs are created to represent unique tokens, as an example, rare swords, a car you named after something you like, and your own character in a game can be NFTs since these are unique.
Created by Enjin CTO Witek Radomski, ERC-1155 is an Ethereum standard (a format of standardized coding rules and data structures) that allows for infinite amounts of both fungible (identical) and non-fungible (unique) tokens in a single deployed smart contract.
Tokens standards like ERC-20 and ERC-721 require a separate contract to be deployed for each token type or collection. This places a lot of redundant bytecode on the Ethereum blockchain and limits certain functionality by the nature of separating each token contract into its own permissioned address. With the rise of blockchain games and platforms like Enjin Coin, game developers may be creating thousands of token types, and a new type of token standard is needed to support them. However, ERC-1155 is not specific to games and many other applications can benefit from this flexibility.
ERC-1155 is also referred to as the “Multi Token Standard.”
It was adopted by Ethereum as an official token standard in June 2019.
Features
- Multiple Tokens: Developers can define and configure both fungible and non-fungible tokens within a single smart contract.
- Advanced Capabilities: Users can trade, destroy, use, upgrade, combine, rent, loan, and lose their assets.
- Gas Saving: Using the Multi Token Standard can cut gas fees by up to 90% when minting new tokens.
- Atomic Swaps: Enables swaps of any number of tokens in two simple steps.
- Multi-Transfers: This Allows users to send tokens to multiple recipients in a single transaction.
The ERC-1155 standard
Reference links for ERC-1155
By abstracting the Ethereum back-end interactions, developers and users can create their NFTs by only focusing on what is important for them, without needing to understand how the Enjin Smart Contract works, and without any sort of coding expertise needed.
To create an NFT in the Enjin Platform, a developer would need to have an amount of ENJ or JENJ, create an Enjin Platform account, create a collection and link your Enjin Wallet to that specific collection, after doing that, the process of creating the NFT would only involve a few parameters presented by the Enjin Platform, such as the amount of NFTs being created, Enjin backing, transfer fees and a few other parameters that we will cover in the Enjin Platform API tutorials.
Metadata, in the context of programming, refers to data of the containers of data, as a description of a resource, structural information about an object, or reference such as the contents of any piece of information.
In the context of the FT & NFT world, metadata refers to a piece of data that gives the context of what an FT or NFT actually is, each NFT in the Enjin Platform contains a "metadata" parameter that it can be referred to, which gives information on what that specific NFT is. As an example, this specific metadata file can contain a name, image, description, and other rich information about that specific NFT.
With the Enjin Platform, developers are able to store images, gifs, and videos as a way to enrich the NFTs created and improve the user experience.
This information is stored on a public online repository off-chain so that information can be fetched and read by users and any supported platform that may interact with that specific NFT.
Last modified 1yr ago