The future of NFTs starts with an X

Published in

Coinmonks

4 min readApr 16, 2023

Since January the market has been in an uptrend and it seems like this bear market really hasn’t run out of steam yet.

However, if your portfolio is made up mostly out of NFTs, you are feeling left behind as the NFT market hasn’t been doing much. Most projects continue to bleed compared to the rest of the market.

Thankfully, there are projects out there that continue to innovate, even in the NFT space. One of these projects is called Backpack and is being developed by Coral.

Backpack

At first glance you’d say that Backpack is just another wallet. However there is more then meets the eye. The Backpack framework is basically an operating system for the latest token standard called xNFT.

With the Backpack wallet, you run the Backpack Operating system straight from your browser, allowing you to interact and execute xNFTs with the click of a button.

xNFTs

So what’s an xNFT? The X stands for eXecutable and it’s at the heart of the innovation. Regular NFTs contain meta data that describes the content and what makes the NFT unique.

The xNFT standard will go one step further and include executable code in each NFT. Why is this important?

Take this simple example: you have a DeGods NFT and you want to receive the native token by staking your DeGods. This means you have to connect your wallet that holds the DeGods NFT to a third party website and lock it into a new smart contract. This introduces another layer of complexity and an additional security risk.

The xNFT will solve this issue by including the code required to stake the NFT directly in NFT itself. As a result your Backpack wallet will be able to execute any and all code that is included in the NFT straight from the wallet, eliminating the need of connecting to a 3rd party website.

Imagine this standard to be rolled out across different chains and integrated directly into your Chrome browser. This would make the web3 experience truly seamless.

App store

To fully understand what you can do with xNFTs, it’s important that you let go of the idea that an NFT is a JPEG. With xNFTs your NFT can be a piece of code holding an entire dApp.

And that’s exactly what you can find in the xNFT library: an App Store-like experience, listing all xNFT compatible projects that you can run straight from your Backpack wallet.

So how does it work? Simply download the Backpack wallet plugin from the Google Play store, create a new wallet and go to the xNFT library to connect your wallet.

Backpack browser plugin for Google Chrome

Once you are connected, you can start downloading and installing application into your wallet.

Once installed, the xNFT/app will show in your Backpack wallet, ready for use. Easy as that.

Proof of concept: Madlads

On the 20th of April, Coral will launch the first xNFT collection called Madlads and it’ll run on Solana. As that is only 4 days from now, it’ll probably be hard to get on the whitelist (called Madlist). But you can always try.

As to be expected, the mint will run in Backpack and not through a 3rd party website and I expect that they’ll be showing off what xNFTs can do in the very near future using the Madlads project.

The future

What will the future bring for xNFTs? First of all: the new standard is only supported by Solana at this time. However the goal is to go cross chain and the Backpack wallet already supports some cross chain activity between Solana and Ethereum.

The xNFT standard will also be integrated in the Solana Mobile Stack (SMS) and therefore natively supported in their upcoming Solana phone and all other future phones built on the SMS framework.

In the end, the evolution from NFT to xNFT makes sense and it’s possible other standards will be proposed on different chains. Time will tell which standard will come out on top.

Useful resources

Some useful resources that helped me better understand the xNFT concept:

Full disclosure

When reading the Alchemy article I did notice the founders used to work for FTX. I can understand this is a sensitive topic, so I’m putting it out there.

Personally I don’t think it should matter as they’ve done good work on Anchor, an open source framework for developing Solana progams in Rust and they continue the development on Backpack.

#solana #nfts #blockchain

That’s all for folks ;-) If you liked this article, please give it a clap.

Bren