What do you think of Solana Blinks: Is it a technological innovation?

Author: HAOTIAN, Source: Author's Blog

What do you think of the recently hotly discussed @solana Actions and Blinks? Although I have heard a lot of "innovative progress" and "catalyst for large-scale applications", in my opinion, Blinks does not have much technical innovation, and it is too early to talk about Mass Adoption. Its appearance has strengthened the market impression of Solana's new generation of consumer application blockchain, which is a beneficial exploration. Next, let me talk about my opinion:

1) From a technical perspective, Solana Actions and Blinks are a set of development tools that make it easy for developers to integrate applications.

Actions can be considered as a development adaptation standard, which is a backend framework that defines how users can trigger on-chain transactions through a unified URL interface in the App environment, including asset transfer, NFT interaction, voting, staking, rewarding and other operations;

Blinks can be considered as a front-end integration technology that allows a set of complex execution parameters containing transaction intentions to be integrated into a URL, and can connect to other web3 wallets to help developers quickly present the Actions interaction method to users in a visual process and experience.

Specifically: Actions will integrate the key information required by users to trigger transactions (such as receiving addresses, transaction instructions and other basic parameter metadata) into a standardized URL. Users can directly interact with the URL in other App environments, thereby triggering a process to build, sign and submit an on-chain transaction.

2) At first glance, this is just an ordinary development tool and service that converts URL links into signable transactions. This, like the previous, @SuiNetwork's zkSend, which allows users to receive cryptocurrency like sending an email; and @ton_blockchain's mini app, which allows users to directly initiate interactive commands in the chat interface, all belong to the same category of interactive experience optimization.

The focus is not on the technology itself, but on how many developers have launched applications based on this interactive method, how many users have accepted this interactive method, etc., which can be classified as "interactive abstraction", with the goal of improving the user's participation threshold and experience in the onboard blockchain environment.

However, the ideal is beautiful, but the reality is full of challenges. For example: directly implanting interactive links in Twitter for interactive payment can bring a certain experience upgrade, but the adaptation problems of mobile and desktop terminals, the cognitive gap and trust problems of users clicking on links, and the potential security risks and obstacles behind the links are all fundamental factors that affect the in-depth application of this interactive method in the short term.

Therefore, I personally think that what Blinks can bring to Solana that can be equivalent to the application scenarios of Solana Pay and how many platforms and users can accept it still lacks a "rigid" driving factor. Imagine that users use Bots in Telegram to grab chips faster, but what is the motivation for users to use Blinks? Voting, mini-games, rewards, etc. are obviously not powerful driving scenarios.

3) Although it is not worth over-promoting Blinks alone, combined with the recent 2.0 upgrade announced by Solana, the exploration of Firedancer's diversified clients, and the landing of Pay applications promoted by Solana in combination with Paypal, etc. It can be seen that the strategic positioning of Solana and Ton is similar, which is nothing more than a tendency to help the large-scale landing application of blockchain and the integration of web2 market and web3 technology framework.

As a new client, Firedancer aims to solve the unreliability (downtime) problem of Solana blockchain, and use innovative multi-process software and hardware deployment methods to make Solana a new generation of consumer-grade blockchain with higher performance, better parallelism, and lower resource consumption.

In short, whether the vision can be realized remains to be seen, but Solana can always deliver some progressive answers at a certain point in time, in addition to the criticized Tugouchain. Today's Blinks, tomorrow's xxxx, Solana ecology is always progressing, this is the real signal that Blinks and others convey to the market.