Memecoins
Solana adds ‘blinks’ and ‘shares’ so users can trade cryptocurrencies on their favorite social apps
The Solana blockchain has been the epicenter of crypto’s latest “memory coin” frenzy, and a new set of features for the chain — what’s being called Actions and flashes – could help make meme coins and other hot blockchain trends accessible to a wider audience.
Developed by the Solana Foundation in partnership with development shop Solana Dialect, Blinks and Actions allow users to transact on blockchains directly from the websites and social platforms they use every day.
“Solana Stocks allow users to execute on-chain transactions across various platforms, including websites, social media, and physical QR codes,” Solana Foundation explained in a statement to CoinDesk. “Actions make it easy for developers to integrate everything you can do in the Solana ecosystem directly into their apps.”
The technology will be supported by popular Solana wallets such as Ghost And Backpack from the start, and other platforms will be able to integrate it by following the implementation instructions in the channel developer’s documentation.
Coin traders buy and sell digital assets shaped after everything from old-school internet memes to political figures. Solana has been the biggest coin hub recently, serving as home to assets such as Australian rapper Iggy Azalea’s viral hit. Mother token ($MOTHER), which has a market cap of $70 million less than a month from its June launch, and dogwifhat ($WIF), the star of the 2024 meme coin craze, which boasts a market capitalization greater than $2 billion.
Although meme coins have many opponents (meme coin trading is sometimes more like gambling than investing), some crypto advocates believe the hype surrounding them could help push blockchains further afield. into the mainstream.
But for blockchains to become ubiquitous, the technology behind them desperately needs an upgrade. Complicated wallet software and difficult-to-navigate trading platforms continue to make coin trading (and crypto trading in general) difficult to access for newcomers.
This is where Solana’s new features come into play.
“Shares and blinks on Solana enable any website and application on the Internet to be a distribution point for on-chain interactions, furthering the goal of mainstream adoption,” said Jon Wong, Head of Ecosystem Engineering at the Solana Foundation.
For example, a person could embed an “action” in a post X that references a particular memecoin. Users who see the post can click on it and immediately initiate a transaction on Solana, adding the token to their own blockchain wallet. Users can also use “blinks” (a portmanteau of “blockchain” and “link”) to share other users’ actions with their own followers.
“From your X feed, you can buy an NFT, tip a creator, receive money, vote, stake, trade and much more.” says Chris Osborn, founder of Dialect.
Accessibility has long been blockchain’s Achilles’ heel, and Solana’s new features follow similar developments as other ecosystems.
Blinks and actions share a strong resemblance to, for example, Farcaster – the Type X social platform on Coinbase’s Base blockchain. Farcaster users can easily embed direct links to blockchain assets in their posts, as well as specialized Facaster. customers love Kiosk – a promising utility from the creators of the Web3 publishing platform Mirror – makes blinking calls to action a key selling point.
Farcaster, Kiosk, and Solana are all clearly motivated by the fact that social media platforms are at the forefront of crypto culture, where users go to exchange memes, news, and trading opportunities. Solana’s technology differs in that it connects blockchain functionality to existing Web2 social applications rather than new standalone Web3 applications.
“It makes so much sense in a social media feed,” Osborn told CoinDesk, but the Dialect founder hopes the actions could eventually disrupt the very way the web works.
“Broadcasting these Actions in feeds like “What I’m really excited about is what is the real, non-skeuomorphic Internet equivalent of ‘Web3’? We don’t know what it is, but I think this idea of actions is what’s at heart.”