The developer of Solana ecosystem, Coral, backed by the venture capital arm of FTX and Jump Crypto, has closed a 20 million dollar funding round, directed towards building out their new flagship product, Backpack.
Backpack is an interactive wallet that delivers “crypto-native experiences” through so-called executable nonfungible tokens or xNFTs.
Coral is a company that essentially provides smart contract tools and other resources for Solana developers.
Backpack will be a new type of wallet that serves Solana developers and anyone interested. xNFTs are digital assets that, unlike regular NFTs, grant their owners the right to execute some type of tokenized computer code. To narrow it down, xNFTs holders will be able to add custom exterior data to their tokens. This may unlock plenty of opportunities ranging from games, and movies, to other projects.
“We can move from smart contracts, go up the stack to the UI layer, where we can have decentralized ownership of code and provide all the developer tooling to make that happen.”
Coral founder Armani Ferrante said in an interview, attempting to decentralize the user interface(UI) layer consisting of applications and websites that remain largely centralized. The wallet will pave the way for the decentralization of the UI by affecting its base of smart contracts and protocols.
Backpack had a private beta launch on Sept. 26, with almost 10 of the biggest projects on Solana already using Backpack’s xNFT technology to develop new projects such as the NFT marketplace Magic Eden, decentralized finance protocol Solend, cross-chain bridge Wormhole, and the developer framework Anchor.
Solana’s core infrastructure has room for improvement and adjustment, which is why companies such as Jump Crypto decided to participate in order to increase reliability and prevent previous outages and slow throughputs from coming about.
The company’s cryptocurrency(Solana) has already outperformed Ethereum in the last quarter and may continue to do so as Backpack exits the beta version.