Translation: Vernacular Blockchain
Recently, Solana and Dialect jointly launched the new Solana concept "Actions and Blinks", which enables one-click operation functions such as exchange, voting, donation and minting through browser extensions. Actions simplify the execution of various operations and transactions, while Blinks ensure network consensus and consistency through time synchronization and sequential recording. The combination of the two enables Solana to provide a high-performance, low-latency blockchain experience. The development of Blinks requires the support of Web2 applications, which brings issues of trust, compatibility, and cooperation between Web2 and Web3. Actions and Blinks rely more on Web2 applications to obtain traffic compared to Farcaster and Lens Protocol, which rely more on on-chain security.
According to the official definition: Solana Actions is a standardized API that returns transactions on the Solana blockchain. These transactions can be previewed, signed, and sent in a variety of environments, including QR codes, buttons + widgets, and websites on the Internet.
Actions can be simply understood as transactions waiting for signature. To further expand, Actions is an abstract description of the transaction processing mechanism in the Solana network, covering a variety of tasks such as transaction processing, contract execution, and data operations. Users can send transactions through Actions, including token transfers and purchases of digital assets. Developers use Actions to call and execute smart contracts to implement complex on-chain logic.
Solana handles these tasks through "Transactions", each transaction consists of a series of instructions executed between specific accounts. Through parallel processing and the Gulf Stream protocol, Solana pre-forwards transactions to validators, reducing confirmation delays. Through a fine-grained locking mechanism, Solana can process a large number of conflict-free transactions at the same time, greatly improving system throughput. Solana uses Runtime to execute transactions and smart contract instructions to ensure the correctness of transaction inputs, outputs, and status during execution.
After the initial execution, the transaction waits for block confirmation. Once a majority of validators agree on a block, the transaction is considered final. Solana can process thousands of transactions per second with confirmation times as low as 400 milliseconds. Thanks to the Pipeline and Gulf Stream mechanisms, the throughput and performance of the network have been further improved.
Actions are not just tasks or operations, they can be transactions, contract execution or data processing. These operations are similar to transactions or contract calls in other blockchains, but Solana's Actions have unique advantages:
Efficient processing: Solana has designed an efficient method to process Actions, allowing them to be executed quickly in large-scale networks .
Low latency: Solana’s high-performance architecture ensures that the processing latency of Actions is very low, supporting high-frequency transactions and applications.
Flexibility: Actions can perform a variety of complex operations, including smart contract calls and data storage/retrieval (see the extension link for more details).
According to the official definition: Blinks can convert any Solana Action into a shareable, metadata-rich link. Blinks enables Action-enabled clients (browser extension wallets, bots) to expose more functionality to users. On the website, Blinks can instantly trigger transaction previews in wallets without redirecting to decentralized applications; in Discord, bots can extend Blinks into a set of interactive buttons. This enables on-chain interaction with any web interface that displays a URL.
Simply put, Solana Blinks convert Solana Actions into shareable links (similar to HTTP). Websites and social media can become venues for on-chain transactions by enabling functionality in supported wallets such as Phantom, Backpack, and Solflare, allowing any website with a URL to initiate Solana transactions directly.
In summary, although Solana Actions and Blinks are permissionless protocols/standards, they still require client applications and wallets to ultimately help users sign transactions, compared to intent narrative solvers.
The direct goal of Actions and Blinks is to "HTTP chain" Solana's on-chain operations and parse them into Web2 applications such as Twitter.
Farcaster is a decentralized social graph protocol based on Ethereum and Optimism, enabling applications to pass through the blockchain , P2P network and distributed ledger and other decentralized technology interconnections. This allows users to seamlessly migrate and share content between different platforms without relying on a single centralized entity. Its Open Graph protocol, which automatically extracts linked content from social network posts and injects interactive features, enables content shared by users to be automatically extracted and transformed into interactive applications.
Decentralized network: Farcaster relies on a decentralized network, avoiding the single point of failure problem of centralized servers that is common in traditional social networks. It uses distributed ledger technology to ensure data security and transparency.
Public key encryption: Every Farcaster user has a pair of public and private keys. The public key is used to identify the user, while the private key is used to sign their actions. This approach ensures the privacy and security of user data.
Data portability: User data is stored in a decentralized storage system rather than on a single server. This gives users full control over their data and the ability to move it between different apps.
Verifiable Identity: Through public key encryption technology, Farcaster ensures that each user’s identity is verifiable. Users can prove control of an account by signing actions.
Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs): Farcaster uses decentralized identifiers (DIDs) to identify users and content. DIDs are based on public key encryption and are highly secure and immutable.
Data consistency: To ensure data consistency on the network, Farcaster uses a blockchain-like consensus mechanism (with "posts" as nodes). This mechanism ensures that all nodes agree on user data and operations, maintaining data integrity and consistency.
Decentralized Applications: Farcaster provides a development platform that allows developers to build and deploy decentralized applications (DApps). These applications can be seamlessly integrated into the Farcaster network to provide users with a variety of functions and services.
Security and Privacy: Farcaster emphasizes the privacy and security of user data. All data transmission and storage are encrypted, and users can choose to make content public or private.
In Farcaster’s new feature Frames (different Frames integrate with Farcaster and run independently), users can turn “casts” (similar to posts, including text, images, videos, and links) into interactive applications. This content is stored in a decentralized network, ensuring its permanence and immutability. Each post has a unique identifier when published, making it traceable and verifying the user's identity through a decentralized authentication system. As a decentralized social protocol, Farcaster’s clients integrate seamlessly with Frames.
Farcaster protocol is divided into three main layers: identity layer, data layer (Hubs) and application layer. Each layer has specific functions and roles.
A. Identity layer
Function: Responsible for managing and verifying user identities; providing decentralized identity authentication to ensure the uniqueness and security of user identities. Includes four registries: ID Registry, Fname, Key Registry and Storage Registry (refer to link 1 for details).
Technical principle: Use decentralized identifiers (DIDs) based on public key encryption technology. Each user has a unique DID used to identify and verify their identity. The use of public and private key pairs ensures that only the user can control and manage their identity information. The identity layer ensures seamless migration and authentication between different applications and services.
B. Data layer - Hubs
Function: Responsible for storing and managing user-generated data, providing a decentralized data storage system to ensure data security, integrity and accessibility.
Technical principle: Hubs are decentralized data storage nodes distributed in the network. Each Hub serves as an independent storage unit and is responsible for storing and managing part of the data. Data is distributed across hubs and protected by encryption technology. The data layer ensures high availability and scalability of data, allowing users to access and migrate their data at any time.
C. Application layer
Function: Provide a platform to develop and deploy decentralized applications (DApps), supporting various application scenarios, such as social networks, content publishing and messaging.
Technical principle: Developers can use the APIs and tools provided by Farcaster to build and deploy decentralized applications. The application layer integrates seamlessly with the identity layer and data layer to ensure authentication and data management during application usage. Decentralized applications run on decentralized networks and do not rely on centralized servers, thus enhancing the reliability and security of applications.
A.Solana’s Actions & Blinks
Solana’s Actions and Blinks are designed to connect the traffic channels of Web2 applications. Its direct impact is as follows:
User perspective: Simplifying the transaction process, but increasing the risk of fund theft.
Solana perspective: Greatly enhances cross-border traffic effects, but faces compatibility and support challenges under Web2 censorship.
Within Solana’s extensive ecosystem, future developments such as Layer2, SVM and mobile operating systems may further enhance these capabilities.
B. Ethereum’s Farcaster Protocol
Compared with Solana’s strategy, Ethereum’s Farcaster protocol weakens Web2 traffic integration and enhances overall censorship resistance and security. The Farcaster + EVM model is more in line with the native concepts of Web3.
Lens Protocol is another decentralized social graph protocol designed to give users complete control over their social data and content. With Lens Protocol, users can create, own and manage their social graphs, and seamlessly migrate them across different apps and platforms. The protocol uses NFTs to represent users’ social graphs and content, ensuring data uniqueness and security. As a protocol on Ethereum, Lens Protocol has some similarities and differences with Farcaster:
A. Similarities:
User control: In these two protocols, users have complete control over their data and content .
Authentication: Both use decentralized identifiers (DIDs) and encryption technology to ensure the security and uniqueness of user identities.
B. Differences:
Technical architecture:
Farcaster: Based on Ethereum (L1), it is divided into an identity layer to manage user identities, a data layer (Hubs) for decentralized storage nodes, and a DApps development platform. The application layer uses offline Hubs for data dissemination.
Lens Protocol: Based on Polygon (L2), NFT is used to represent the user’s social graph and content. All activities are stored in the user’s wallet, emphasizing data ownership and portability.
Verification and Data Management:
Farcaster: Uses distributed storage nodes (Hubs) to manage data, ensuring security and high availability, with annual handle updates and reaching consensus through delta graph.
Lens Protocol: Personal data archive NFT ensures the uniqueness and security of the data without updating.
App Ecosystem:
Farcaster: Provides a comprehensive DApps development platform, seamlessly integrated with its identity and data layer.
Lens Protocol: Focuses on the portability of user social graphs and content, supporting seamless switching between different platforms and applications.
Through this comparison, we can see that Farcaster and Lens Protocol have similarities in user control and authentication, but significant differences in data storage and ecosystem. Farcaster emphasizes layered structures and decentralized storage, while Lens Protocol highlights the use of NFTs for data portability and ownership.
Through the above analysis, these three protocols each have their own advantages and challenges.
Solana has quickly gained traction by leveraging social media platforms and using Blinks for its high performance and ability to turn any website or app into a cryptocurrency trading gateway. However, its reliance on Web2 brings trade-offs between traffic and security.
Lens Protocol, founded in 2022, uses its modular design and on-chain storage to provide good scalability and transparency, capturing early market opportunities, but may face challenges in cost, scalability and market FOMO sentiment.
The advantage of Farcaster is that its design is closest to Web3 principles and provides the highest degree of decentralization. However, this also brings challenges in technology iteration and user management.
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