Coral, the Solana developer platform, has helped design dev tools for the Solana blockchain ecosystem.
On Wednesday, the firm announced it raised a $20 million strategic round headed by FTX Ventures and Jump Crypto, with Anagram, Multicoin Capital, K5 Global, and others participating.
Coral aims to use the funds to launch a product known as Backpack, an interactive crypto wallet that provides crypto-native experiences via executable NFTs (xNFTs).
The founder, Armani Ferrante, described the product with an Apple iPhone analogy. He said that the Backpack wallet is like the iPhone’s iOS operating system that allows users to manage their private keys and access xNFTs, like the apps on the iPhone.
According to Ferrante, “On top of Backpack, we have this concept of xNFTs. So we have not just these decentralized protocols, but we also have decentralized applications or UIs, and we can have this curated experience for xNFTs.”
The company also offers a developer tool known as ReactxNFT, which Ferrante revealed could be compared to Apple’s Swift and UIKit packages.
“We can build on this platform and take advantage of these APIs to build compelling user experiences on top of Backpack,” he added.
Ferrante and the company hope to build Backpack into a “network in its own right” to assist create a concept of multichain identity for Web3 users via xNFTs.
Ferrante expressed, “I could do things like play games with [xNFTs], I could do things like see if they’re online and connected and what they’re doing on the blockchain. I think building this as a primitive and exposing it to applications is going to be a really powerful feature. That’s going to be the unique thing that brings all this together to create a truly social experience that wrangles a lot of the problems that we see in web3 today,”.
Leveraging the Discord community
The Backpack Discord community has about 2,000 members. Ferrante said the community had been intentionally locked up until this Wednesday, Coral’s Backpack announcement.
Coral plans to launch Backpack in private beta and open-source its code, offering Discord members priority access. Over 10 of Solana’s largest projects have been working on projects or tasks that leverage Backpack’s protocol.
Meanwhile, Solana Labs, the firm that develops the Solana protocol, has earlier established a Web3-focused smartphone called Saga. Now, Ferrante revealed that the Coral team is communicating with the team behind Saga to see how xNFTs will run as native apps on the smartphone.
Ferrante said, “In the same way that you’ll be able to go into the Saga app store and download [an app like] Magic Eden, there’ll be a xNFT section. You’ll be able to download xNFTs and see them on your home screen.”
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