Solana's Social Media Battle Begins: Will Blinks Drive Mass Adoption?

On June 25th, Solana released a new protocol called Blinks (Blockchain Links), which quickly gained support from over ten top protocols in the Solana ecosystem, including Tensor, Phantom, and Jupiter.

Solana introduced Blinks as a way to connect Solana with the Web2 internet. Essentially, Blinks can generate links for any on-chain operation, allowing project teams or users to create their own Blinks and share them on social media. These links create interactive card-style interfaces that users can directly interact with using their wallets.

Solana's founder, Toly, stated that Blinks can turn Web2 into Solana's L2 while ensuring economic security. This indicates Solana's strategy to leverage the massive traffic of social media platforms to shorten the path for Web2 users to enter Web3, promoting the transition of Web2 users to Web3.

Implementation Path

As mentioned, Blinks convert on-chain operations into links using a core technology stack called Actions. Actions is a protocol that creates and delivers Solana transactions via URLs, allowing Solana to be shared anywhere. Blinks is a client that detects Actions' URLs and expands them into a full experience.

The technology behind Actions and Blinks was developed in collaboration with Dialect. The team has already integrated Actions and Blinks directly into Twitter and provides native support in Phantom, Backpack, and Solflare. Specific operations like Swap and Mint NFT are supported by corresponding protocols within the ecosystem.

Social Adoption and Challenges

The social path is proving to be a powerful avenue for mass adoption. Examples include Farcaster, which integrates on-chain identity creation, storage rental, key maintenance, and decentralized off-chain data storage, forming a decentralized social graph. Another example is The Open Network, backed by Telegram's billion-user resource, integrating social apps and wallets to occupy unique resources.

Solana has chosen a different approach by encapsulating complex on-chain operations and presenting a more user-friendly front-end interface, aiming for mass adoption through the user base of Web2 social media. However, the specific interaction mode preferred by the public is yet to be determined.

Potential issues could hinder large-scale adoption of Blinks, such as platform bans and phishing links posted by fake accounts. These concerns may impact Solana's broader adoption.