The venture capital division of FTX and Jump Crypto led a $20 million fundraising round for the Solana, California-based startup Coral with participation of Multicoin Capital, Anagram, K5 Global among others. The funds will be used to finish developing Backpack, the company’s first flagship product, a wallet for executable non-fungible tokens (xNFT). Backpack is said to deliver crypto-native experiences through executable NFTs (xNFTs).
What does xNFT mean? X stands for eXecutable—tokenized code representing ownership rights over its execution.
Armani Ferrante, creator of Coral, explains the goal of xNFTs by tracing decentralized ownership from smart contracts through their associated protocols and then up to the user interface (UI) layer, which consists mostly of centralized applications and websites. Beginning with a wallet, Backpack strives to decentralize the user interface layer.
Read More: What are NFTs?
“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. We have the ability to build on this platform and take advantage of these APIs to build compelling user experiences on top of Backpack” Armani Ferrante explained.
Backpack will be released later this month with the funds used to scale the team.
Coral sends Backpack into private beta and releases the source code for the project. Members of the Backpack Discord channel get preferential access, while other users can register on the official website. Approximately 10 prominent projects on Solana are now utilizing Backpack’s xNFT technology, including the NFT marketplace Magic Eden, the DeFi protocol Solend, the cross-chain bridge Wormhole, and the Anchor framework.
Coral has played a crucial role in the development of developer tools for the Solana blockchain ecosystem. According to the firm, Anchor is the most popular smart contract developer framework for Solana. In the Web 2.0 realm, Anchor is comparable to Ethereum’s Hardhat or Ruby on Rails.
