Solana Adds \'Blinks\' and \'Actions\' So Users Can Trade Crypto On Their Favorite Social Apps

The epicenter of the latest "memecoin" hype, Solana is introducing new tools designed to make crypto trading more accessible

Solana is adding new features called "Actions" and "Blinks" that will allow users to trade crypto directly from their favorite social media platforms. The move is designed to make crypto trading more accessible to a wider audience, especially in light of Solana's recent status as the biggest hub for meme coins.

Solana Foundation describes Actions as a way for users to carry out on-chain transactions across various platforms. The Foundation adds that the new feature will allow developers to integrate everything you can do in the Solana ecosystem right into their applications. The tech will be supported by popular Solana wallets like Phantom and Backpack from the get-go. At the same time, other platforms will be able to integrate it by following implementation instructions in the chain's developer docs.

Solana has become a hotbed for meme coins in recent months, with several such assets skyrocketing in value and traders buying and selling digital assets fashioned after everything from old-school internet memes to political figures. Solana is also hosting a meme coin protocol called dogwifhat (&$WIF), which has become the breakout star of the 2024 **meme** coin craze and boasts a market cap of over &$2 billion.

While meme coins have many naysayers and meme coin trading sometimes feels more like gambling than investing, some crypto proponents believe the hype around them could help carry blockchains further into the mainstream. However, for blockchains to become truly ubiquitous, the tech underlying them desperately needs an upgrade, and complicated wallet software and hard-to-navigate trading platforms continue to make meme coin trading—and crypto trading in general—hard to access for newcomers. That's where Solana's new features come in.

"Actions and blinks on Solana allow 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, Solana Foundation's head of ecosystem engineering. For example, a person could embed an "action" into an Xpost that references a particular meme coin. Users who see the post could 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 actions from other users with their own followings.

"From your Xfeed, you can buy an NFT, tip a creator, receive money, vote, stake, swap, and so much more," said Chris Osborn, founder of Dialect.

Accessibility has long been blockchain's Achilles heel, and the new Solana features follow similar moves from other ecosystems. For instance, blinks and actions bear a striking resemblance to Farcaster–the X-like social platform on Coinbase's Base blockchain. Farcaster users can effortlessly embed direct links to blockchain assets in their posts, and specialized Fascaster clients like Kiosk—an up-and-coming utility from the creators of Web3 publishing platform Mirror—make blink-like calls-to-action a core 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 tech differs in that it plugs blockchain functionality into existing Web2 social apps rather than new, standalone Web3 apps.

"This makes so much sense in a social media feed," Osborn told CoinDesk, but the Dialect founder hopes Actions could eventually disrupt how the web works at its very core. "Delivering these actions into feeds like X, Reddit, maybe Discord soon—these other platforms where people want to have these Actions experiences—is just the beginning," said Osborn. "What I'm really excited about is, what's the non-skeuomorphic true 'Web3' internet equivalent of this? We don't know what that is, but I think this idea of actions is what's at the core."

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