Solana dev platform Coral raises $20M led by FTX, Jump Crypto to build web3’s iPhone • TechCrunch

Developers are a major catalyst for growth in the competitive world of layer-one blockchains. Where developers go, they build applications and robust ecosystems, and user activity and interest tend to follow.

Coral has been involved in building out development tools for Solana’s blockchain ecosystem. The startup created Anchor, which it says is the most popular smart contract developer framework for Solana. Anchor is similar to Ethereum’s Hardhat or Ruby on Rails in the web2 world, founder Armani Ferrante told TechCrunch in an interview.

The company announced today that it has raised a strategic round of $20 million led by FTX Ventures and Jump Crypto with participation from Multicoin Capital, Anagram, K5 Global and others. It plans to use the funding to launch a product called Backpack, an interactive crypto wallet that it says delivers crypto-native experiences through what the company calls executable NFTs (xNFTs).

Ferrante explained the product through an analogy – Apple’s iPhone. The Backpack wallet, Ferrante said, is like the iPhone’s iOS operating system, where a user can manage their private keys and access xNFTs, which are like the apps on the iPhone.

“On top of the backpack, we have this concept of xNFTs. So we not only have these decentralized protocols, but we also have decentralized applications or user interfaces, and we can have this curated experience for xNFTs,” Ferrante said.

Coral also offers a developer tool called ReactxNFT, which Ferrante said could be compared to Apple’s Swift and UIKit packages.

“We have the ability to build on this platform and take advantage of these APIs to build compelling user experiences on top of the backpack,” Ferrante said.

Eventually, Ferrante hopes to develop Backpack into a “network in its own right” to help establish a concept of multi-chain identity for users in web3 through xNFTs.

“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 very powerful feature. “It’s going to be the unique thing that brings all of this together to create a truly social experience that solves a lot of the problems we see in web3 today,” Ferrante said.

xNFTs on Coral’s Backpack Platform Image credit: Coral

The Discord community around Backpack has about 2,000 members today, which Ferrante said has been intentionally locked down until today’s announcement that Coral will launch Backpack in private beta and open source, giving Discord members priority access. Over 10 of the largest projects at Solana are already working on projects that leverage Backpack’s protocol, according to Ferrante.

Ferrante’s iPhone analogy seems particularly apt when you consider that Solana as an ecosystem has chosen to invest in hardware. Solana Labs, the company that develops and improves the Solana protocol, launched a web3-focused smartphone called Saga earlier this summer. Ferrante said the Coral team is in close contact with the team behind Saga, and that he eventually hopes to see xNFTs running as native apps on the smartphone.

“In the same way that you will be able to go into the Saga app store and download [an app like] Magic Eden, there is an xNFT section coming. You will be able to download xNFTs and see them on your home screen,” said Ferrante.