Coral raises $20 million for ‘xNFT’ blockchain wallets

Coral, the creators of a blockchain development tool called Anchor, has raised $20 million for a new type of cryptocurrency wallet.

The company plans to use the funds to recruit a team and launch its first flagship product, the Backpack, later this month. The wallet uses something new called executable NFTs (xNFTs).

FTX Ventures and Jump Crypto led the round, with participation from Multicoin Capital, Anagram, K5 Global and other strategic investors.

“This is potentially the ‘iPhone launch moment’ for Web3 with xNFTs as apps, xNFT Marketplace as App Store and CoralOS as iOS. It’s surprising that Backpack hasn’t been built in Web3 until now,” said Ramnik Arora, Product Manager at FTX, in a statement.

Backpack will be an interactive wallet that delivers crypto-native experiences through xNFTs, which act as native applications in Backpack. Any user with an xNFT in their wallet can launch the application or experience in that xNFT.

These xNFTs are analogous to WeChat widgets; they represent a portal to applications, games or assets built on any chain. Using Backpack, for the first time, users can access all their assets and decentralized apps in one place, the company said.

Coral has some history with those paying attention in blockchain circles. Anchor is the most popular development framework for Solana, the company said. Anchor is the programming scaffold that all developers in the Solana ecosystem use to create smart contracts, which define how applications work on the blockchain.

Backpack

There are well-known barriers to blockchain adoption: onboarding, discovery, and multi-chain user experiences. Backpack addresses each of these by enabling users to engage with all their assets, be they tokens, decentralized applications, fiat onboarding or NFTs, natively in a single, unified interface, the company said.

Today, Coral will release Backpack to private beta and open source. Community members in the Backpack Discord channel will receive priority access. Anyone is welcome to sign up for the backpack.app beta. Over 10 of the largest projects at Solana already have projects in active development to take advantage of Backpack’s new technology.

“We are excited to launch an incremental feature enhancement in the way users in the Solana ecosystem interact with protocols and smart contracts,” said Armani Ferrante, founder of Coral, in a statement. “xNFTs make the crypto experience smoother, require fewer steps, and empower projects to create more customized experiences for their communities. As a best-in-class wallet, our goal is to make Backpack the default portal to the Solana ecosystem.”

“I look forward to Backpack bringing the application layer to the forefront, allowing engineers to build native applications that reduce the barrier to entry and the friction of discovery that we see in crypto user experiences today,” Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana Labs, said in a statement .

Coral made Backpack and the react-xNFT developer framework available to a select group of lighthouse projects and developers in June. As a result, several xNFT projects plan to launch with the private beta, including Magic Eden, Aurory, Mango Markets, DeGods, Cardinal, Wormhole, Squads, Solend, Degenerate Ape Academy, Squads, Wordcel, DefiLand, and Anchor. Each of these xNFTs will live as native experiences in Backpack and be accessible directly from the respective projects.

“xNFTs are in the green when it comes to specifying decentralized applications. This is a first attempt at a framework for applications that compose across decentralized stacks in a protocol-agnostic way. Armani and Tristan are an excellent team to make this vision a reality reality, and we’re excited to see what they build,” Kanav Kariya, president of Jump Crypto, said in a statement.

As the ecosystem of xNFTs grows, builders are invited to create new high-quality experiences for Backpack using the react-xNFT framework, which will be publicly available at beta launch.

After launch, the team plans to bring the application layer to the forefront and abstract the blockchain by allowing users to use xNFTs from any chain with balances from any chain.