Coral, the makers of Anchor, the most popular Solana development framework, today announced a strategic round of $20 million co-led by FTX Ventures and Jump Crypto with participation from Multicoin Capital, Anagram, K5 Global, Frictionless, and other strategic investors. The company plans to use the funds to recruit and build a world-class team and to launch its first flagship product, Backpack, later this month.
Backpack is an interactive, first-of-its-kind wallet that delivers crypto-native experiences through executable NFTs (xNFTs). xNFTs act as native applications within Backpack—any user with an xNFT in their wallet can launch the application or experience within that xNFT. xNFTs are analogous to WeChat mini-programs; they represent a portal to applications, games, or assets built on any chain. Using Backpack, for the first time, users can access all of their assets and decentralized apps natively in one place.
Today, Coral will launch Backpack into Private Beta and open-source the code. Community members in the Backpack Discord will get priority access. Anyone is welcome to sign up for the Beta at backpack.app. Over ten of the largest projects on Solana already have projects in active development to take advantage of Backpack’s new technology.
“We’re excited to launch a step-function improvement in the way users in the Solana ecosystem interact with protocols and smart contracts. xNFTs make the crypto experience smoother, require less steps, and give projects the power 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,” stated Armani Ferrante, Founder of Coral.
There are well-known barriers to adoption of blockchains: onboarding, discovery, and multi-chain UX. Backpack addresses each of these by enabling users to engage with all of their assets, whether they are tokens, decentralized applications, fiat onboarding, or NFTs, natively in a single, unified interface.
“I’m looking forward to Backpack bringing the application layer to the forefront, by allowing engineers to build native applications that reduce the barrier to entry and the friction of discovery that we see in crypto’s user experiences today,” said Anatoly Yakovenko, Co-Founder of Solana Labs.
Coral made Backpack and the react-xNFT developer framework available to a select group of light house projects and developers this past June. As a result, several xNFT projects are planning 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 within Backpack and be available directly from the respective projects.
“xNFTs are in greenfield space in specifying decentralized applications. This is a first attempt at a framework for applications composing across decentralized stacks in a protocol agnostic fashion. Armani and Tristan are an excellent team for making this vision a reality, and we are excited to see what they build,” said Kanav Kariya, President of Jump Crypto.
As the ecosystem of xNFTs grows, builders are invited to create new high-quality experiences for Backpack using the react-xNFT framework, which will become publicly available at the Beta launch.
“This is potentially the ‘iPhone launch moment’ for Web3 with xNFTs as apps, xNFT marketplace as the App Store, and CoralOS as the iOS. It is surprising that Backpack hasn’t been built in Web3 until now.” said Ramnik Arora, Head of Product at FTX.
Following launch, the team behind Anchor, the programming scaffolding that every developer in the Solana ecosystem uses to create smart contracts, plans to bring the application layer to the forefront and abstract away the blockchain by allowing users to use xNFTs from any chains with balances from any chain.
To learn more about Coral, Backpack, and xNFTs, please visit https://www.backpack.app/.
About Coral
Coral is the technology company developing Anchor, the most popular Solana development framework, Backpack, and the xNFT protocol.
