In the blink of an eye, Solana Blink has sparked a consumer-grade crypto application trend
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In the blink of an eye, Solana Blink has sparked a consumer-grade crypto application trend
You might miss the entire game if you're not careful.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: kel xyz
Compilation: TechFlow
"Unlock market potential." ——Sean Carter
Double-Line Thesis
Integrating crypto-native applications into any app interface via Dialect Blinks will be the breakthrough that brings Solana apps into the mainstream, unlocking 1000x growth potential. Investing across a range of consumer applications is an effective strategy to capture Solana's growth opportunity.
"Allow Me to Reintroduce": Introducing Blinks
The possibility of Solana reaching $1,000 (or even over $3,000) hinges on numerous innovative applications choosing Solana as their platform in the coming years. The rise of these applications will significantly increase demand for $SOL.
While investing in SOL for appreciation has become highly popular, direct investment in the applications driving SOL’s growth remains unpopular—mainly due to their current underperformance.
Blinks changes this entirely, reducing the difficulty of accessing crypto-native applications by orders of magnitude.
Currently, Blinks are only available to users who have enabled wallet browser extensions.
By allowing developers to port part or all of their applications into an ever-growing number of other app interfaces, Solana applications can freely propagate across the internet in countless ways.
This helps expand application revenue markets, enabling apps to export all value-generating activities—such as trades, purchases, and gaming actions—into any third-party application.
On this foundation, the vision of the web3 world computer becomes achievable.
Thesis: Web3
Just as open finance relies on recombining financial primitives, Web3 is built upon the separation of data ownership and application logic. In the past, Web2 applications typically bundled data storage and application logic together. The core shift in Web3 lies in decoupling data from application logic. Through this separation, data owners no longer need to trust application providers to manage their data.
Source: Multicoin Capital, "Crypto Mega Theses"
Therefore, we believe the investment opportunity in consumer applications has never been greater, while market interest remains at a low point.
In today's market, the best way to express long-term bullishness on Solana is to invest in the consumer applications that will drive its future success.
So if Blinks are so great, why does CT think nobody is using them?
Because CT missed the key insight—it’s become routine.
CT seems perpetually focused on short-term minutiae while missing the big picture.
Try closing Dexscreener and stepping back for a moment.
Who knows—you might just see an entirely new forest from above.
"Cambrian Explosion": Blinks Rising Across Markets
Just two months since Blinks launched, we’ve already seen rapid growth in Blink-centric applications. At minimum, these apps serve as proof-of-concept, demonstrating Blinks’ potential across multiple markets:
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Gaming
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User Experience
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Advertising
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E-commerce
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Payments
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Developer Tools
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And likely many more fields. Let’s review current progress to update our expectations for future developments.
Gaming
The gaming industry is extremely profitable. In fact, mobile game revenues alone in 2023 surpassed the entire market cap of the Solana blockchain.
Let that sink in.
Most of this revenue comes from games downloaded via Apple App Store or Google Play. Have you ever seen those simple game ads on Instagram?
Yes, some young people from Kazakhstan have earned millions through such ads.
But how much more could be earned if users didn’t need to download games to play them?
Currently, media content shown via Blinks is relatively simple. However, in theory, real-time animations could be rendered through Blinks. I'm not suggesting GTA 6 will become a native Blink game, but crypto games don't need GTA-level graphics to succeed. The mechanisms that allowed Axie’s ecosystem to reach high valuations can be fully replicated within Blinks.
How many people would participate if players could enjoy Axie while scrolling Twitter?
If every non-major-studio game could run inside any app—not just their own—their popularity would inevitably rise.
Starblink is an early proof-of-concept for this idea. It uses an attention-mining mechanic where players earn rewards based on interactions generated by Blinks on their mining rigs. Attention fuels resource mining, which can upgrade rig attributes or be invested in friends' rigs.
I’m unsure whether this specific game model will gain traction, but compared to other game models we've seen in crypto, it’s already quite sophisticated.
Keep in mind, Blinks have only existed for about two months—what kinds of Blink-native games will emerge in two years?
Consumer Experience
If friendtech had run as an experience on Twitter, would it have attracted more users?
Almost certainly yes.
We’re already seeing multiple attempts to improve consumer experiences in both web2 and web3 by lowering friction and increasing incentives. Here are a few examples:
Drip leverages Blinks technology to integrate tensor trading functionality directly into its app interface as an executable button. This allows users to trade without leaving Drip—an app that has seen 2 million unique active wallets over the past few years.
I’ve often abandoned new crypto apps or services because I had to leave my current context, register a new account, and adapt to a new platform. Integrating app features directly into content streams users already engage with can dramatically boost engagement.
Imagine being able to one-click purchase a meme on Twitter right after Elon posts.
Subslink enables creators to create and manage subscriptions simply by sharing links. Consider how much revenue paid-access trading groups, research blogs, and paid newsletters generate.
The answer: quite a lot.
Now imagine replacing these cumbersome steps:
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Visiting a new website,
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Connecting your wallet to a new platform (or worse, entering credit card details),
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Adding an email address, and finally
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Reading the newsletter,
With simply:
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Clicking a “Subscribe to Newsletter” button within any platform.
How many more people would sign up?
In the future, users could pre-configure information in their wallets—email addresses for subscriptions, Telegram accounts for updates, or X DMs for bot notifications. The customization possibilities are endless.
Advertising, Payments & E-commerce
Influencers effectively capture attention.
And attention equals wealth in today’s society.
Advertising aims to monetize attention.
In crypto, capturing this attention value hasn’t evolved much beyond the tactics used on Exchange Alley in 1720:
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Driving traffic via exchange referrals
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Sharing personal opinions or insights
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Leveraging influence for privileged access
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Deceiving followers for profit
What if instead, we developed dynamic ads that programmatically distribute value across the entire value chain?
What if these ads could appear in any media format, feature any call-to-action (CTA), and allow users to execute CTAs directly within their current app interface?
This would make crypto advertising more powerful than even Instagram’s best efforts.
This is exactly what shill.fm and blinkify have begun building in preliminary versions via Blinks within just a few months.
The same market expansion principle applies—if ads enable one-click actions across the internet, click-through rates and revenue per impression could theoretically rise significantly.
It’s not that the trillion-dollar advertising industry needs a bigger audience to attract attention.
Payment experiences could become richer. Today’s online shopping is optimized primarily for function. Blinks may push the boundaries of efficiency, enabling functional payments to also become engaging at scale. See the example of Baxus Blinks. Anyone can use rich metadata to build visual experiences via Blinks, as already demonstrated by Solana Stats.
Developer Tools
If you believe AI will only get better, this section is for you.
Forget about downloading cursors, grabbing v0 builds, syncing replits—the tedious stuff.
Let’s deploy AI experiments directly onto the blockchain via Twitter.
The simplest form—generating AI images and attaching them to tokens—has already been achieved by Img Gen Blink.
What limits exist for such innovation? Why shouldn’t I be able to deploy an AI application on-chain in the next 2, 3, or 5 years?
Perhaps there are technical constraints buried somewhere between absurd price targets set by foolish traders (like another side of myself).
Who knows. But clearly, there’s massive design space here for bold experimentation and exploration.
"Climbing Heaven's Arena": Challenges Facing Blinks Adoption
Killua, Gon, and another stare up at Heaven's Arena
If things were as simple as outlined above, Blinks would have already taken over the internet. In reality, several challenges remain (besides blind spots I may have overlooked):
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Security: The immediate reaction to Blinks is concern over security. While the Dialect-maintained Blink registry partially mitigates this, it introduces centralization risks. What if approved registry links get compromised? Though beyond my technical depth, it’s still worth noting.
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Adoption of New Standards: No matter how compelling Blinks’ advantages, driving adoption of any new technical standard is always harder than expected.
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Killer Applications: Blinks open vast design space for developers, but someone still needs to create compelling applications on this canvas. For now, skepticism persists until clear success stories emerge.
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Blink Accessibility: Blinks need to work in as many environments as possible. Currently, they're limited to desktop Chrome extension users with operations enabled (these should be enabled by default!)
"Game Start": Final Thoughts
What if any app could embed other apps?
What kind of impact would such a question have on the market?
We’ll find out soon enough.
This could very well be the second phase of the so-called consumer app supercycle.
Pump fun has already fired the starting gun.
Look away for a second, and you might miss the entire race.
Disclaimer
The information contained in this publication, including but not limited to research, analysis, data, or other content, is provided for informational purposes only. This article does not constitute financial, investment, trading, or any other form of advice. We remind all readers not to rely on this information for financial investment decisions or other financial uses, and to seek independent professional financial advice. The author makes no guarantees regarding the accuracy of any information used in financial decisions by others.
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