Surreal

Your go-to mobile app for everything on-chain

3 min readDec 5, 2023

Written by Ali Smith, Portfolio Manager, Consensys Mesh

Summary

Surreal is a one-stop mobile app for all on-chain content including art, music, videos, podcasts, 3D visuals, and written pieces. Through its sleek user interface anyone can mint, manage, and showcase their NFTs seamlessly across multiple chains and wallets. Watch the video below for a closer look.

Team

The company was started by Artiom Ignatyev, a New York-based designer and entrepreneur with a passion for enhancing the crypto user experience. Prior to starting Surreal, Artiom co-founded Linkdrop, a NFT marketing platform that helps companies create and deliver NFTs to their communities. Linkdrop was a part of our second ever Tachyon accelerator cohort and graduated back in 2019! The company serves a range of clients, including Coinbase, Ledger, eBay, and Binance. The core Surreal team consists of four developers and one designer, in addition to Artiom. Surreal is headquartered in Brooklyn, New York.

How does Surreal work?

Major brands are embracing Web3, rolling out projects that span marketing, loyalty programs, customer experiences, and address existing business challenges. Yet, the success of these ventures and the overall expansion of the crypto industry is contingent on the availability of intuitive onboarding platforms and applications.

Surreal originated from a group of friends’ shared experience: the group, passionate about NFT collecting, was limited by the subpar user interfaces of existing crypto mobile applications. These apps were often slow, fragmented and failed to provide users with the utility to share and display their on-chain assets.

Surreal has been meticulously designed to address these issues. The app supports a range of on-chain content and allows users to manage and use their NFTs with ease. With compatibility across numerous wallets and L2s (e.g., Base, Zora, Optimism, and Arbitrum) Surreal accommodates a broad range of users, offering them an easy-to-use platform to mint, hold and engage with their on-chain assets.

Additionally, Surreal is launching an in-app minting experience where users can mint NFTs natively on mobile with the option of paying via Apple Pay. Payments that are made using Apple Pay will not require transaction signatures. This feature will offer a secure, intuitive, and web2-familiar experience for users.‍

What are example use cases?

Browse your collection: Navigate through your NFT collection on mobile with ease. Simply open a collectible and swipe to view the rest. If there are items you’d rather keep out of sight, Surreal’s Bag feature has you covered — just a long press, and they’re hidden from view.

Utilize on-chain media: Surreal supports a variety of on-chain media, such as music and videos through a seamless user experience. Listen to your on-chain podcasts on-the-go, and even when your screen is locked the audio is uninterrupted.

Share with friends: With Surreal, you can easily share art, music covers, 3D visuals, and video snippets. Generate a preview of your collectibles in just two taps, and even highlight specific frames from exceptional video artworks. Then, share these snippets across your preferred social platforms.

Collect Mirror articles: Experience Mirror posts seamlessly in the Surreal app. Discover and collect articles from @viamirror and enjoy reading them conveniently on your smartphone through the Surreal app.

Coming soon — In-app minting: Surreal is gearing up to roll out their new in-app minting feature. This feature will allow users to mint NFTs directly on mobile with the option of payment via Apple Pay, eliminating the need to sign any transactions.‍