In the recent market, in addition to the hotly discussed political MEMEs, another term has quietly emerged in the Solana ecosystem - Blinks.
This article aims to provide a starting point for discussion. It will explain what Blinks is, what is its ecology and application scenarios, and look forward to its development space, so that more people can come up with assumptions and ideas about the future of Blinks.
What is Blinks?
On June 25, the Solana Foundation announced the launch of two new features, Solana Actions and Solana Blinks, which will allow users to connect their wallets and send transactions without leaving the website they are currently on.
The Solana Foundation said that by using Actions and Blinks, any website that can display a URL can use these new features. In other words, users can interact with a chain activity link including Mint and Swap by embedding it in social media.
Blinks Principle and Tutorial
1. Technical foundation
Blinks stands for Blockchain Links. It was jointly created by Dialect and Solana. It allows developers to create Actions (formerly Solana Pay) to convert Solana's various interactions into interactive buttons on the X platform in the form of links (URLs). Users can operate directly on Twitter without page jumps.
Action is a standardized API standard that can return Solana on-chain transaction information. Developers can embed Action directly into their Dapps, presenting only interactive buttons and basic information to users on the front end, so that users can perform on-chain transactions without having to jump to other websites.
Blink, on the other hand, turns Action into a sharable metadata link, which is the presentation carrier of the Action client on the front end. In addition, Action and Blink are also compatible with multiple formats such as links, QR codes, push notifications, and messaging applications, which can derive a variety of application scenarios.
Simply put, when the user interacts with the Blink button on the terminal application, the application will interact directly with the Solana network through Action.
The launch of Blinks and Actions has improved the interactive experience on the Solana chain on the user side. Although there is no revolutionary innovation in terms of technology, its convenient functions not only provide a convenient and fast interactive path for users in the circle, but also lower the threshold for Solana to go beyond the circle and attract incremental users.
2. Usage Tutorial
To use Blinks related functions, just find "Experimental Features" in Phantom's settings, turn on the function and refresh the web page to enable it successfully.
Currently, Dapps such as Phantom, Backpack, Jupiter, Raydium, and Tensor already support Blinks.
Anyone only needs to attach the target Dapp link in the tweet, and after the tweet is successfully sent, the X front-end will display the Blinks interaction page.
Blinks Ecosystem and Use Cases
The following article will review the many use cases of Blinks and introduce several major applications and developer tools in the current ecosystem, including: SEND, blnk.fun, Solana Summer Blinks, Blinks Editor, and Dialect.
1. Use Cases
Blinks has a wide range of use cases. Developers’ creativity allows Blink to be flexibly deployed in various scenarios. Here are some use cases for reference (all images are from @thesendcoin):
Use case 1: Guessing
Use Case 2: DM Multi-Signature
Use case 3: Airdrop inspection
Use case 4: Mini-games
Use Case 5: Mint and Bid of NFT
Use Case 6: Event Tickets/Registration
Use case 7: Pay for creation
Use Case 8: DM Transactions
Use case 9: Tipping
Use Case 10: Application Interaction
It is not difficult to see that Blinks' embedded principle brings many new and composable ways of playing to its ecosystem, and the potential use cases are dazzling. However, due to their large number and easy to understand, we will not analyze them here. We will mainly focus on several major projects that already exist in Blinks' current ecological matrix.
2. Main ecosystem
In the Blinks ecosystem, there are currently the following applications and development tools: SEND, blnk.fun, Solana Summer Blinks, Blinks Editor, and Dialect.
1）SEND ( @thesendcoin )
SEND is the first project in the Blink ecosystem. It is very active in X and has released many application ideas related to Blink. SEND is also a project co-founded by Solana @aeyakovenko and is suspected to have a close relationship with Solana officials.
SEND officially issued Send It NFT through Blink on July 3, with a total of 100,000 pieces. It was sold out in a short time and began trading on Tensor.
Later on July 13, it announced the launch of the token $SEND, which started trading on the 15th.
According to the situation of SEND on X, it is not difficult to see that this is a team that has prepared content and strategy in advance. For an early ecosystem like Blink, if high-quality projects can be launched in the early stage and the secondary market performs well, the ecosystem will logically be more likely to attract and accept more increments and form a leading flywheel effect. At present, SEND is probably like this for Blink. Compared with some other projects, it is more mature in product quality and operation, and has the potential to become the leader of the Blink ecosystem.
Surprisingly, both tokens and NFTs showed a trend of opening high and closing low.
Send It NFT price trend (Source: Tensor)
SEND token price trend (Source: Birdeye.so)
Send It NFT has a stronger performance of opening high and closing low. It took only one week from the opening price of around $1 to the peak price of $73. Then there was a huge selling pressure, and the market collapsed directly. In addition, the $SEND token fell sharply. It had a small increase at the opening, but the price was smashed to the freezing point in less than two hours, and a large number of users suffered losses. Because of this, SEND is currently suffering a lot of FUD in the community. As of press time, the team has not yet made a positive response to the phenomenon of the market crash.
At present, the follow-up actions of the SEND team are mainly at two levels:
Announcement of Tokenomics
SEND Tokenomics (Source: SEND official account)
In short, the official claimed that only $75,000 was raised for the initial offering and liquidity guidance, and a FDV of $500,000 was set. In order to ensure fairness in the launch, the team distributed a large number of chips to the Solana NFT community and the Builder community. In order to prevent snipers from obtaining a large number of chips, it opened Alpha Vaults and set a soft cap of 999 SOL (about $150,000), but eventually 720,000 SOL (about $105 million) was deposited in it, and the official has refunded the excess.
The official seemed to be trying to explain indirectly that the dumping was caused by the community and early holders, rather than the team.
SEND Alpha Vault（Source：Metaora）
On the other hand, the SEND team launched Blinks Explorer, where all users can go to onlyblinks.com to submit Blinks.
In the browser, the team has classified various Blinks, and all users can view the latest and hottest Blinks in real time in the browser. For users, in addition to searching for Blink on X, they can also quickly filter directly through the browser. From a practical point of view, onlyblinks also plays a finishing touch in the Blink ecosystem.
Due to its high opening and low closing performance, SEND’s popularity has dropped a lot and its community has not yet grown. However, it is relatively close to Solana officials and may still have certain exposure and opportunities. It may take some time to observe SEND and Blink itself.
2）blnk.fun ( @blinkdotfun )
blnk.fun is a meme copycat similar to pump.fun. The front end is roughly the same as pump. The gameplay is to purchase memes through blnkfun's front end and directly share Blink with the purchase link on X. The difference is that there is no bonding curve setting. The token is listed on dex when it is issued, which weakens the PVP attribute. In essence, it is another low-threshold launch platform for memes.
At present, some of the above MEMEs have a certain trading volume, but the UI is not as perfect as Pump.fun. There is no embedded K-line viewing, and the coin holding address does not have notes on dev and holding ratio, etc. The functions still need to be improved.
Another problem is that the contract address of the token is not clearly placed. The purchase interface does not seem to directly post the contract, and it must be found through SolScan. However, after copying the address to Birdeye.so, the disk is quite different from the address of the big holders, and there are also discrepancies in the market value. It is not clear whether blnkfun has falsified data or the output on the Birdeye end is wrong. It is still early and the risk is high. Please be cautious.
3）Solana Summer Blink ( @SolanaSumerBL )
Solana Summer Blink is also a relatively active Blinks ecosystem project. The team issued the NFT of the same name and then tried to build a community around NFT.
The total amount of NFTs in this project is 1 million, which are open to the community in the form of free mint, and each wallet can mint unlimitedly. The huge total amount not only lacks scarcity, but also benefits scientists to batch mint, so the hype value of NFTs in this project is not high. On the other hand, due to these problems, its mint website was visited and clicked a lot in a short period of time, and the backend server crashed. The team tweeted that the devs have maintained and modified the code overnight and will be online today (7.18).
Currently, the project's official website is inaccessible and has been marked as a malicious website by Phantom. Readers are advised to pay attention to the risks and not to interact with the project for the time being.
It is worth mentioning that Toly also forwarded and called for orders for this project. This shows that the quality of the project forwarded by Toly has not been strictly reviewed, and it is intended to increase the popularity of the Blinks ecosystem. However, the quality of products varies, so readers are requested to identify the risks by themselves.
4）Blink Editor （@zen913）
Blink Editor is a low-threshold platform for quickly creating Blink, developed by @zen913.
After connecting to the wallet, you only need to select the type of Blink to create, and you can quickly and easily create your own Blink. No coding knowledge is required. The overall process is similar to creating tokens with Pump.fun, which is very simple to operate.
@suji_yan, founder of @therealmasknetwork, donated 0.1 ETH to ZEN. Currently, more Blinks features are under development, and the red envelope feature will be launched soon.
5）Dialect ( @saydialect )
As the developer of Action and Blink, Dialect itself provides a convenient way to convert URL to Blink. You only need to go to its website dial.to, enter the target URL, and submit the conversion. In addition, there is also a more "orthodox" Dialect plug-in available for download.
However, since Blink can be sent directly on X and there is a certain learning threshold, users may not use Dialect very frequently. We can look forward to whether the Dialect team will design and invest more functions, features, and gameplay in the website or Blink itself in the future to attract users to use its products.
In addition to the above applications, there are many Blinks that have not been mentioned that can be found and viewed on channels such as X or OnlyBlinks. The Blinks ecosystem is still in its early stages. With the continuous emergence of new ideas, more Blinks Dapps will inevitably enter the market in the future.
Blinks’ imagination
The topic of mass advertising has always been controversial. The market is currently in a serious stock game, with altcoins falling but not rising, and the overall sentiment is low. In order to welcome the real bull market, in addition to a loose external macro and regulatory environment, the crypto market also needs a narrative that can truly break the circle, land, and attract and guide the outside increments to enter the market.
SocialFi? GameFi? Account abstraction? AI? RWA? DePin? NFT? I’m afraid this question can only be answered after going through this cycle, or even longer, but this does not prevent us from opening up our imagination for the existing narrative.
As the majority in the market, only after we fully understand the various potential possibilities, make judgments, and plan ahead, will we have the opportunity to reap joy and freedom when the trend comes.
1. Blinks breeds fraud and is full of risks
Before you imagine Blinks, you must first pour cold water on it.
The blockchain is a dark forest, with asset thefts and token scams happening every day. Due to the learning threshold of blockchain principles and usage, as well as the high frequency of phishing websites, users are hard to guard against in the market, and the birth of the Blinks component has further promoted the increasingly rampant blockchain scams.
Blink interaction is on-chain interaction.
Any operation through Blink will require wallet authorization and signature, and we know that for phishing websites, once the wallet is authorized, it is almost equivalent to the theft of funds. Blink facilitates the normal on-chain experience of users and also facilitates phishing gangs. In the future, it may not even be necessary to make the front end of the phishing website. You only need to convert the link to Blink to "conveniently" take away the assets in the interactive wallet. **Therefore, security issues are the first and most important test for Blinks to move towards Mass Adoption. **When interacting with Blinks, readers must also check the X account that sends Blinks and Blinks itself again and again, try to use new wallets for interaction, and use some external security plug-ins to assist in identifying phishing links to avoid unnecessary property losses.
In addition, Blinks' risks also come from various projects and project owners of varying quality.
SEND started high and ended low, leaving community supporters bruised and battered. Solana Summer Blinks itself is not technologically mature, and its official website was marked as a scam by Phantom. There is a high probability that more such phenomena will occur in the future, so readers should also pay attention to the risks when making related investments.
2. Mass Adpotion concept, attention economy, Solana flywheel
Why is Blinks so imaginative?
Timing: This round of bull market is about to usher in the main upward wave. There is a strong expectation that the Federal Reserve will start cutting interest rates in September. Trump supports cryptocurrency and is likely to succeed in November.
Location:
Blinks is backed by the Solana ecosystem. Popular narratives such as AI, DePin, and various DeFi applications, innovative projects emerge in endlessly, and the most important thing is the prevalence of MEME culture. High TPS and low Gas are inherently friendly to retail investors, and the attention economy effect is significant;
On the other hand, X is one of the largest social media in Web2, with nearly 1 billion users and over 400 million active users. The dissemination potential and effect of Blinks on X will be considerable.
People and:
Stripe announced in April this year that it would support USDC payments again. In February this year, Stripe completed a $695 million financing, with the latest valuation reaching $95 billion. In the USDC payment video, Stripe showed the Phantom wallet making payments through Solana, which is close to Sol officials and may become the top business of Stripe's encrypted payment sector in the long run;
In addition to Stripe, PayPal’s stablecoin PYUSD was also launched on Solana on May 29, further expanding the payment landscape;
On the other hand, Sol wallet TipLink has a strong background. In February last year, it was led by Multicoin and Sequoia Capital, with participation from Solana Ventures, Circle Ventures, and Alameda. Combined with the close relationship between these institutions and Stripe, TipLink may also be promoted outside the circle.
On July 19, the Sol Foundation announced a $400,000 funding program for Blinks developers. As an official feature of Sol, Blink is bound to promote the development of its ecological applications.
From this, we can imagine a Solana Mass Adoption flywheel built by the Sol ecosystem, connected by Stripe, and undertaken by X:
Blinks itself does not focus on technological innovation, but it pays attention to improving user experience. When functions such as on-chain product promotion, on-chain guessing, on-chain voting, and on-chain one-click purchase rebate gradually become popular, the marginal effect of the attention economy increases, and the attraction multiplier for incremental users outside the circle may increase sharply. This is where Blink can provide a very low-threshold market entry solution for users outside the circle, bridging the C-end of the traditional and crypto markets.
Taking all the above advantages into account, for a Solana ecosystem to C technology that is in its very early stages and has a very broad target group, I believe that Blinks still has considerable application prospects and development potential in the medium and long term.
Credits: Cage / Mat / Darl
Editing and proofreading: Punko
Special thanks: Thanks to the above partners for their outstanding contributions to this issue.