By Alex Liu, Foresight News

TON’s success depends on its ability to reach 900 million Telegram users, allowing a broad user base to use blockchain and cryptocurrency without having to understand complex terms and perform cumbersome operations. With the newly launched Blinks and Actions, Solana chain users can now transfer funds on Telegram, buy and sell NFTs on X, and stake in Discord without the need for DApps, and the audience has even expanded to the entire Internet.

How is this achieved? Is this expansion a dimensionality reduction attack on the single App ecosystem?

Buy Mad Lads NFTs on X with Blinks without going to the NFT marketplace

What are Blinks and Actions?

Actions

Solana Actions are a set of canonical APIs that return transactions on the Solana blockchain for preview, signing, and sending in a variety of contexts including QR codes, buttons in mobile and desktop applications, widgets, and any website. Actions make it easy for developers to integrate actions executable across the Solana ecosystem into the user’s context, allowing users to perform blockchain transactions without being navigated to another application or web page.

Blinks

The full name of Blinks is Blockchain Links, which is a new primitive that converts on-chain operations into shareable links.

Initiate on-chain donations via a URL

Solana interactions can now be initiated anywhere a link can be shared on the internet (even on X!). Blinks turns any Solana Action into a shareable, metadata-rich link, allowing Action-aware clients (browser extension wallets, bots, etc.) to surface additional functionality to the user. On a website, Blinks might instantly trigger a transaction preview in a wallet without having to enter a DApp; in Discord, a bot could expand Blinks into a set of interactive buttons.

In short, Blinks enables any internet page that can display a URL to interact on-chain.

Differences between Actions and Blinks

Actions are APIs that allow complex business logic (on-chain and off-chain) to build transaction messages that are previewed, signed, and sent by the client. Buttons, QR codes, or URLs (Blinks) can initiate actions.

Key Benefits of Acitons and Blinks

  • Enhance the user experience by providing signable transactions for the platform the user is currently on. For example, users do not need to go to the NFT market to buy NFTs, but can buy and sell them the moment they see the NFT image (which may be X, Discord, Telegram, Instagram, etc., any platform that can display the URL).

  • Improve the accessibility of Web3 applications from any platform. That is, you can divert traffic to DApps from other platforms on the Internet.

  • Eliminate the hassle of multiple clicks on multiple websites to send on-chain transactions.

  • Simplify the process for developers to integrate on-chain operations into existing platforms, websites or applications.

 

Example

Actions example:

  • Stake SOL to help secure the Solana network, including liquidity staking tokens

  • Allow customers to scan QR codes to pay in retail stores

  • Improving the minting experience with tokens as the entry barrier

  • Enables e-commerce sites to accept cryptocurrency payments directly on product pages

  • Top up your trading account before receiving a margin warning

  • Integrate blockchain capabilities into gaming platforms for in-game asset purchases and transactions

Blinks example:

  • Tip content creators on social media without complicated wallet setup

  • Mint custom NFTs or participate in governance votes directly from the URL

  • Enable users to vote on community policies via a link in the newsletter

Vote on-chain proposals directly in Discord

Summarize

By packaging complex on-chain interactions into standardized APIs and further abstracting them into easy-to-spread URL links, Blinks and Actions can effectively expand Solana's application scenarios and better "connect blockchains and cryptocurrencies to the entire Internet." They are practical innovations that help Solana gain widespread adoption.