Solana blinks are struggling with discoverability on X

22.08.2024

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Howdy!

I tried building a blink for today’s newsletter, but turns out it’s a bit more involved than launching a pump.fun token.

I need an intern to do these things for me. Compensation would be tips on fast food app deals, plus I’ll DM you funny tweets. You know where to find me. Anyways:

Blinks are hard to find on X

Roughly two months ago, Dialect and the Solana Foundation unveiled actions and blinks.

At the time, the primitive was hailed as a way to put the crypto back into crypto Twitter.

But for many of crypto’s social media denizens, blinks — a portmanteau of “blockchain” and “links” that allows onchain transactions to happen directly within X — have yet to become a common part of their time spent scrolling.

I asked my own X followers if they interacted much with blinks. “Never see them,” the first reply read. “i have never seen a blink,” said the second.

It’s still in the very early innings, to be fair. But it seems, at least for now, that blinks are suffering from a bit of a discoverability problem.

Earlier this week, one X user posed the question of why blinks are “so pushed” despite, in the user’s opinion, a lack of widespread adoption so far. Some replies mentioned the lack of mobile usage or security concerns. One idea that caught my eye was a general sentiment that blinks aren’t very useful for buying and selling crypto — which was one of the popular ways blinks were first demoed.

“Blinks are best suited for quick actions. If you’re constructing a trade where slippage or an order type matters, it’s probably not the best tool for the job,” Multicoin Capital partner JR Reed told me in a text, adding: “If you go re-read the original announcement there were several actions that were imagined for blinks: donate, vote, claim, buy, swap, vote, predict, etc.”

There are certainly small blinks actions out there: artist tips, onchain chess matches and prediction market bets are a few that come to mind.

There’s also the fact that blinks are kind of hard to find.

Dialect CEO Chris Osborn told me that in his opinion, “blinks are pre-product-market fit in their end user usage, as is the case for most crypto today,” but boosting discoverability — by doing things like having all wallets toggle blinks on by default — could change that.

Solana actions and blinks use browser wallet extensions to work, so blinks won’t natively render on X “for a long time,” Osborn said.

This strikes me as a big hurdle for widespread blinks usage. A Wall Street Journal story from 10 years ago said 85% of Twitter usage happened on mobile. It’s hard to imagine that proportion has gone down much.

Osborn said that links leading to blinks on Dialect’s dial.to site have a greater “value prop” than just rendering blinks on X — comparing the experience to “stripe checkout, but for any action on the blockchain.” There’s also the chance that crypto-native sites like DRiP or even crypto wallets themselves catch on better for blinks than X does, Osborn said.

It’s really too early to determine much about blinks based on what we’ve seen so far. There is certainly a lot of developer activity and excitement in a new design space that simplifies crypto transactions. And perhaps the token airdrop meta has led to some short-term-ism where new projects are expected to gain huge traction right after launching.

Still, for now, crypto Twitter users don’t seem to be blinking much on their timelines.

“Solving discoverability and usage is our top priority right now,” Osborn stressed, but that’s “going to take time.”

— Jack Kubinec

Zero In

Memecoins may be unserious, but the infrastructure underneath them is serious business.

This visualization from Decentralised Co shows how a few memecoin-adjacent apps are hauling in nearly as much revenue as DEXs, liquid staking and DeFi lending.

It’s particularly interesting that DEX Screener, essentially a memecoin data app, did nearly $6 million in monthly revenue. I posted about this — and to my understanding, much of this revenue seems to come from token projects paying to upload information about their project.

These days, even little things are making big money in the memecoin business.

— Jack Kubinec