Solana Adds ‘Blinks’ and ‘Actions’ So Users Can Trade Crypto On Their Favorite Social Apps

The Solana blockchain has been at the epicenter of crypto’s latest “meme coin” craze, and a new set of features for the chain called Actions and Winks could help make meme coins and other popular blockchain trends accessible to a wider audience.

Developed by the Solana Foundation in partnership with Solana development shop Dialect, Blinks and Actions allows people to make transactions directly on the blockchain from within the websites and social platforms they use every day.

“Solana Actions allows users to conduct on-chain transactions across a variety of platforms, including websites, social media, and physical QR codes,” Solana Foundation said in a statement to CoinDesk. said. “Actions make it easy for developers to integrate everything you can do in the Solana ecosystem directly into their apps.”

The technology will be immediately supported by popular Solana wallets such as Phantom and Backpack, and other platforms will be able to integrate it by following the implementation instructions in the chain’s developer documentation.

Meme coin traders buy and sell digital assets tailored to everything from old-school internet memes to political figures. Solana has become the biggest hub for meme coins lately, home to assets like Australian rapper Iggy Azalea’s viral Mother token ($MOTHER), which has a market cap of $70 million less than a month before its June launch. dogwifhat ($WIF) is the breakout star of the 2024 meme money craze, with a market cap of over $2 billion.

Although meme coins have their detractors (meme coin trading sometimes feels more like gambling than investing), some crypto advocates think the hype around them could help bring blockchains into the mainstream.

But for blockchains to become ubiquitous, their underlying technology urgently needs an upgrade. Complex wallet software and difficult-to-navigate trading platforms continue to make meme coin trading, and crypto trading in general, difficult to access for newcomers.

This is where Solana’s new features come into play.

“Actions and winks in Solana enable any website and application on the internet to become a distribution point for on-chain interactions, further advancing the goal of mainstream adoption,” said Jon Wong, head of ecosystem engineering at the Solana Foundation.

For example, a person might place an “action” on a post X referencing a specific memecoin. Users who see the post can click on it and immediately initiate a transaction on Solana, adding the token to their blockchain wallet. Users can also use “winks” (a portmanteau of “blockchain” and “link”) to share other users’ actions with their own followers.

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“You can buy an NFT, tip a creator, receive money, vote, stake, trade, and much more from your X stream.” says Dialect founder Chris Osborn.

Accessibility has long been blockchain’s Achilles heel, and new Solana features follow similar moves in other ecosystems.

The winks and actions bear a close resemblance to, for example, Farcaster, the X-like social platform on Coinbase’s Base blockchain. Farcaster users can easily embed direct links to blockchain assets in their posts, and specialized Fascaster clients like Kiosk, a promising utility from the creators of Web3 publishing platform Mirror, make instant calls-to-action a key selling point. .

Farcaster, Kiosk, and Solana are all clearly motivated by the fact that social media platforms where users go to share memes, news, and trading opportunities are at the forefront of crypto culture. Solana’s technology differs by connecting blockchain functionality to existing Web2 social applications rather than new, standalone Web3 applications.

“This makes a lot of sense in the social media feed,” Osborn told CoinDesk, but the Dialect founder hopes Actions could eventually disrupt how the web works at its core.

“Offering these actions in streams like X, Reddit, and maybe soon Discord (other platforms where people want to experience these Actions) is just the beginning,” Osborn said. “What I’m actually excited about is what the real non-skeuomorphic ‘Web3’ Internet equivalent of this is. We don’t know what it is, but I think it’s at the core of the idea of ​​action.”