If you're not careful, you might miss the entire game.
Author: kel xyz
Compiled by: TechFlow
“Unlocking market potential.” —Sean Carter
Two-line argument
Integrating crypto native applications into any application interface through Dialect Blinks will be a key breakthrough for Solana applications to enter the mainstream market, bringing 1000x growth potential. Investing in a range of consumer applications is an effective strategy to capture Solana's growth opportunities.
"Allow me to reintroduce": Blinks' introduction
The possibility of Solana reaching $1,000 (or even over $3,000) relies on numerous innovative applications choosing Solana as a platform in the coming years. The rise of these applications will significantly increase the demand for $SOL.
While investing in SOL for its appreciation potential has become very popular, investing directly in the applications that drive SOL’s growth has been less popular, primarily because these applications are currently underperforming.
Blinks revolutionizes the status quo, making it several times easier to access crypto-native applications.
Currently, Blinks is only available to users who have enabled the in-wallet browser extension setting.
By enabling developers to port parts or entire applications to a growing number of other application interfaces, Solana applications can be freely distributed across the Internet in every possible way.
This helps expand your app's marketplace revenue by allowing your app to export all value-generating activities (such as transactions, purchases, game activity, etc.) to any third-party app.
On these foundations, the vision of the web3 world computer will be realized.
Argument: Web3
Just as open finance relies on the reorganization of financial infrastructure, Web3 is based on the separation of data ownership and application logic. In the past, Web2 applications often bundled data storage and application logic together. The core shift of Web3 is to separate data and application logic. With this separation, data owners no longer need to trust application providers to manage their data.
Source: Multicoin Capital, “Crypto Mega Theses”
As a result, we believe the investment opportunity in consumer applications has never been greater, while market interest is at a low point.
In the current market, the best way to express long-term optimism about Solana is to invest in the consumer applications that will drive its future success.
So if Blinks is so great, why does CT think no one is taking advantage of it?
That’s because CT missed the point – it’s become a routine.
CT always seems to be focusing on the minutiae at hand and losing sight of the big picture.
Try turning off Dexscreener and relax a bit.
Who knows – maybe from a bird’s eye view, you’ll see a whole new forest.
The Cambrian Explosion: Blinks’ Rise in Markets
Just two months since Blinks was launched, we have already seen a rapid growth in applications with Blinks at its core. At the very least, these applications serve as proof of concepts that demonstrate Blinks’ potential in multiple markets:
game
User Experience
advertise
E-commerce
Payment
Developer Tools
There may be more areas Let’s take a look at current progress to update our expectations for future developments.
game
The gaming industry is incredibly profitable. In fact, in 2023 alone, mobile gaming revenues will exceed the market cap of the entire Solana blockchain.
Think about this fact again.
From what I understand, most revenue comes from games downloaded from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. Have you ever seen those simple game ads on Instagram?
Yes, some young people in Kazakhstan are making millions of dollars from these ads.
But how much profit would it bring if you could play these games directly without downloading them?
Currently, the media displayed by Blinks is relatively simple. However, in theory, real-time animation can be displayed through Blink. I am not saying that GTA 6 will become a native game of Blinks, but the success of crypto games does not require GTA-like graphics. The mechanism that enables the Axie ecosystem to reach a high market value can be fully realized in Blink.
If players could play Axie while checking Twitter, how many people would participate?
If all games not made by major studios could run in any app, not just their own, then the popularity of those games would surely increase.
Starblink is an early proof-of-concept project for this idea. Its mechanics are a game based on attention mining, where players are rewarded based on the number of Blinks interactions they generate on their miners. Attention can mine resources for miners, which can be used to improve the properties of the miners or invest in friends' miners.
While I’m not sure if this type of game will be popular, it’s pretty sophisticated compared to other game models we’ve seen in crypto.
It’s worth noting that Blinks has only been out for about two months — what Blinks-centric games will emerge in two years?
Consumer Experience
If what was once friendtech could run as an experience on Twitter, would it attract more users?
The answer is most likely yes.
We have already seen a variety of attempts to improve consumer experience with lower operational barriers and higher incentives in web2 and web3 applications. Here are some examples:
Drip
Drip uses blinks technology to integrate tensor trading functionality into the Drip application interface as a direct-to-action button. This allows users to trade without leaving Drip, an application that has 2 million unique active wallets in the past few years.
There have been many times when I gave up on using new crypto apps or services because I needed to leave what I was browsing, sign up for a new account, adapt to a new platform, etc. Integrating application functionality into content streams that users are already accustomed to can significantly increase user activity.
Imagine that after Elon tweets, users can buy the meme with one click on Twitter.
Subslink
Subslink allows creators to create and manage subscriptions by sending links. Here’s a simple example: Do you know how much revenue paid access to trade groups, research blogs, paid newsletters, etc. can generate?
The answer is quite substantial.
Think about it again, if we can do the following cumbersome steps:
Visit the new website,
Connect your wallet to the new platform (or, more tediously, enter your credit card details),
Add email, and finally
Read the newsletter,
Simplified to:
Click the "Buy Newsletter" button on a platform
So how many people would be willing to sign up for such a service?
In the future, users will be able to pre-set their wallets with any information of their choice: an email address for subscriptions, or a Telegram account for messages, or a private message on Platform X for bots to deliver messages, etc. The customization possibilities are endless.
Advertising, Payments and E-commerce
Influencers are effective in attracting people’s attention.
And attention means wealth in today's society.
The goal of advertising is to gain attention.
In crypto, the approach to capturing this attention value isn’t all that different from the strategy used on the streets of Exchange Alley in 1720:
Get traffic through exchange recommendations
Share personal insights or opinions
Using influence to gain privileged access
Deceiving followers for profit
What if we moved away from these approaches and instead developed dynamic advertising to programmatically distribute value across the entire value chain?
What if these ads could appear in any media format, with any call to action (CTA), and those CTAs could be executed directly within the app interface where the user is?
This would allow crypto’s advertising capabilities to surpass even Instagram’s best efforts.
This is exactly what shill.fm and blinkify developed in a preliminary version through Blinks in just a few months.
The same principles of market expansion apply here - if ads can be executed with one click on the internet, in theory this will increase click-through rates and revenue per impression.
It’s not as if the trillion-dollar advertising industry needs a bigger market to attract attention.
The payment experience may become richer. Current online shopping is mainly optimized for functionality, and Blinks may expand the boundaries of efficiency, making functional payments more attractive while being widely used. Take a look at the example of Baxus Blink. With Blinks, anyone can build a visualization experience with rich metadata, just as Solana Stats has demonstrated.
Development Tools
If you believe AI will only get better, this section is for you.
All that tedious work of downloading cursors, getting v0, and syncing replits?
Forget it.
Let’s deploy AI experiments on the blockchain directly through Twitter.
The simplest form — generating an AI image and attaching it to a token — is already implemented by Img Gen Blink.
What are the limits to such innovation? Why can’t I deploy an AI application on-chain in the next 2, 3, or 5 years?
Perhaps there really is some developmental limit somewhere between the ridiculous price targets set by dumb traders (like my alter ego).
Who knows. But it does seem like there is a lot of room for experimentation and exploration.
“Climbing the Celestial Arena”: The Challenges of Blinks Adoption
Killua, Gon, and another person look at the Celestial Arena
If things were as simple as the above brief description, Blinks would have already taken over the Internet. But in reality, there are still many problems to be solved (besides the blind spots that I may have overlooked):
Security: The gut reaction to Blink is to worry about security. While the Blink registry maintained by Dialect partially solves this problem, it can lead to centralization. Also, what if the pre-approved registry link is broken? While this is beyond my technical understanding, it is still worth paying attention to.
Promotion of new technology: No matter how obvious the advantages of Blinks are, as a new technology standard, promoting its popularity is always more challenging than expected.
Attractive applications: Blinks opens up the design space for application developers, but developers still need to create attractive works on this canvas. At present, everyone is skeptical about its prospects until there are clear success stories.
Blink extensibility: Blinks need to be usable in as many environments as possible. Currently, they are limited to desktop Chrome extension users with actions enabled (these actions should be enabled by default!).
“Game on”: Concluding Thoughts
What if any app could contain any other app?
What impact will such problems have on the market?
We will find out soon enough.
This is likely the second phase of the so-called consumer application super cycle.
Pump fun has fired the starting gun.
If you're not careful, you could miss the entire game.
Disclaimer
The information in this publication, including but not limited to research, analysis, data or other content, is for informational purposes only. This article does not constitute financial, investment, trading or any other form of advice. We caution all readers not to rely on the information in this article for financial investment decisions or other financial purposes, and should seek independent financial advice from professionals. The author does not provide any guarantee for the accuracy of the information in this article for anyone to use for financial decisions.
