Original author: Haotian
What do you think of the recently 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 as a 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 easier for developers to integrate applications.
Actions can be seen as a development adaptation standard. This standard is a backend framework that defines how users can trigger on-chain transactions through a unified URL interface in the App environment, including asset transfers, NFT interactions, voting, staking, rewards, 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 Actions interaction methods 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 a common development tool and service that converts URL links into signable transactions. This is similar to the previous interaction experience optimization, such as zkSend on @SuiNetwork, which allows users to receive cryptocurrency like sending emails, and the mini app on @ton_blockchain, which allows users to directly initiate interaction instructions in the chat interface.
The focus is not on the technology itself, but on how many developers have launched applications based on this interaction method, how many users have accepted this interaction method, etc. It can be classified into the category of interaction abstraction with the goal of increasing the users participation threshold and experience in the onboard blockchain environment.
However, the ideal is beautiful, but the reality is full of challenges. For example, directly embedding interactive links in Twitter for interactive payment can bring a certain experience upgrade, but the adaptation issues between mobile and desktop, the cognitive gap and trust issues 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 shares faster, but what is the motivation for users to use Blinks? Voting, mini-games, rewards, etc. are obviously not powerful driving scenarios.
3) Although Blinks alone is not worth over-promoting, combined with the recent 2.0 upgrade announced by Solana, the exploration of Firedancers diversified clients, and the implementation of Pay applications promoted by Solana in conjunction with Paypal, etc., it can be seen that the strategic positioning of Solana and TON is similar, which is nothing more than being more inclined to assist the large-scale implementation of blockchain and the integration of the web2 market and web3 technical framework.
As a new client, Firedancer aims to solve the unreliability (downtime) problem of the Solana blockchain. It uses 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 progress at a certain point in time, apart from the criticized local dog chain. Todays Blinks, tomorrows xxxx, the Solana ecosystem is always progressing, which is the real signal that Blinks and others convey to the market.
