How to view Solana's Blink application

Readers who know me are aware that I have never been particularly focused on the Solana ecosystem, but recently there has been an interesting innovation within this ecosystem: Blink.

Blink is short for Blockchain Link. Simply put, it is a technology that converts on-chain transactions or actions on Solana into traditional internet operations.

For example, we can transform a transaction on Solana into a link that can be embedded in traditional internet applications. This way, ordinary users can complete a blockchain transaction by simply clicking on this link.

Around this new technology, many projects have begun to emerge in the Solana ecosystem recently.

One of the more popular projects is SEND.

About a week ago, the project team posted a tweet that included a "Collect for Free" button. Users could click this button to mint an NFT directly. Of course, prior to this, users needed to make the necessary settings in their wallets to allow this operation on Twitter.

Once this NFT was launched, it was quickly sold out, and the project team will airdrop "SEND" tokens to the holders of this NFT. As a result, the price of this NFT surged.

In my view, there are two main reasons why this project and technology have quickly gained traction:

First, it greatly enhances the user experience by converting cumbersome wallet operations into traditional internet operations that many users are more accustomed to, lowering the operational threshold for blockchain applications.

Second, it brings this ease of use to Twitter, allowing blockchain applications to spread rapidly through the most popular social tool. This is almost identical to what happened with NFTs back in the day. To some extent, I even think this approach is better than Farcaster.

While I acknowledge that the Farcaster ecosystem has many commendable highlights, I have always felt that creating another social tool with little functional difference is somewhat redundant. Therefore, I prefer this direct utilization of existing social tools, as it can more quickly spread blockchain applications to users outside the circle.

Although this technology has impressive advantages, it also carries certain risks, the biggest of which is security: if a hacker embeds malicious operations into the link and spreads it through traditional media, the impact on victim users could be much broader in the event of an incident.

Therefore, such technology must be approached with great caution during promotion and use.

Ethereum has had a similar precedent, with a typical case being account abstraction.

Account abstraction has been a new feature that Ethereum core developers (including Vitalik) have been actively promoting in recent years. The Ethereum community initially released an EIP-3074 regarding account abstraction. This EIP involves changes to the consensus layer of Ethereum, and it carries a potential risk: once malicious operations are authorized, users' assets could be at significant risk.

The community has had intense debates surrounding this risk. Ultimately, due to safety considerations, this EIP was replaced.

I believe that Blink should also exercise great caution in this regard.

Returning to ecosystem applications, with the successful example of SEND, and given the current market's lack of hot topics, I believe many similar projects will emerge in the near future.

Additionally, I feel that the technical implementation of Blink's functionality does not have a significant barrier. Therefore, I think if this application can ignite the Solana ecosystem in the future, it may be quickly ported to other blockchain ecosystems, bringing a wave of traffic to them.