Readers who know me know that I have never paid much attention to the Solana ecosystem, but there is a recent innovation in this ecosystem that is quite interesting: Blink.
Blink is the abbreviation of Blockchain Link. In layman's terms, it is a technology that converts Solana's on-chain transactions or behaviors into traditional Internet operations.
For example, we can convert a transaction on Solana into a link and embed it into traditional Internet applications, so that ordinary users can complete the transaction on the blockchain by clicking on this link.
Around this new technology, a large number of projects have begun to emerge in the Solana ecosystem during this period.
For example, SEND, which has been very popular recently.
About a week ago, the project sent a tweet with a "Collect for Free" button embedded in it. Users can directly click on this button to mine an NFT. Of course, before this, users also need to make corresponding settings in their wallets to allow this operation on Twitter.
After the NFT was launched, it was quickly sold out. Next, the project will airdrop "SEND" tokens to the holders of this NFT. As a result, the price of this NFT has skyrocketed.
In my opinion, there are two main reasons why this project and technology can quickly go viral:
First, it greatly improves the user experience. It can convert cumbersome wallet operations into traditional Internet operations that a large number of users are more accustomed to, lowering the operational threshold of blockchain applications.
Second, it brings this ease of use to Twitter, allowing blockchain applications to spread rapidly through the most popular social tool like Twitter. This is almost exactly the same as the NFT back then. To some extent, I even think this approach is better than Farcaster.
Although I agree that Farcaster ecosystem has many commendable highlights, I always feel that it is redundant to create another social tool with similar functions. Therefore, I prefer this method of directly using existing social tools, which can more quickly spread blockchain applications to users outside the circle.
Although this technology has outstanding advantages, it also has certain hidden dangers. The biggest one is security: if hackers embed malicious operations into links and spread them to traditional media, once an accident occurs, the area of affected users may be even wider.
Therefore, we must be very careful when promoting and using such technology.
Ethereum has such a precedent, and a typical case is account abstraction.
Account abstraction has been a new feature that Ethereum core developers (including Vitalik) have been promoting in recent years. Regarding account abstraction, the Ethereum community first released an EIP-3074. This EIP's changes to Ethereum involve the consensus layer, and it also has a potential risk: once malicious operations are authorized, the user's assets are at considerable risk.
There was a heated debate in the community about this risk, and eventually the EIP was replaced out of security considerations.
I think the Blink app should also be very cautious in this regard.
Back to ecological applications, with the successful demonstration of SEND in the past, and the current lack of hot spots in the market, I believe that there will be a large number of similar projects in the future.
In addition, I feel that there is not much threshold in the technical implementation of Blink's functions. Therefore, I think if this application can bring popularity to the Solana ecosystem in the future, it is possible that it will be quickly transplanted to other blockchain ecosystems and drive a wave of traffic for other ecosystems.
