think this is spot-on. too many folks got stuck on the distribution part but missed the "new primitive" part around how to reduce time for integration and consider a world where authentication can be pushed to the last step, rather than the first step
Hey @hosseeb, founder of Dialect here, the team that co-launched blinks with @solana. Glad to hear blinks are still on your mind, & that you were bullish on the idea.
Wanted to take a bit of time to give a thoughtful answer on why blinks didn't take off, why the viral launch last summer was as much a curse as it was a blessing, & why despite that we are still very actively working on them. 👇
I’m just gonna say it: there was no world in which blinks as they were launched, as chrome extension injection tricks in Twitter, were ever going to work. And that was never our strategy.
The biggest misconception was that blinks *are* the extension tactic. They aren’t. That tactic was something we added just a few weeks before launch, & it comes with a whole host of problems. A lack of mobile support is just one of many I can name.
We learned very quickly from the data last summer that 99%+ of all interactions with blinks were not happening on Twitter via this extension trick because of those problems, but instead people using them on sites & in apps where they were natively integrated.
I can also share some stats with you: 100s of millions of views, 10s of millions of transactions. But they don’t impress me & they shouldn’t impress you.
Yes, we are still very actively working on blinks. (Breaking: startup is working on a non-consensus bet.) But to solve very different problems, more like the ones we originally set out to solve. Let me explain.
Blinks are APIs for transactions—literally URLs for the blockchain, a.k.a. “blockchain links”—that allow developers to integrate actions into their apps orders of magnitude faster. Less sexy, much more useful.
E.g. we’re working with a number of mobile wallets to help them become super apps. Use blinks to bring quick deposit/withdraw actions to all your DeFi positions with no redirects. Something that would take a lot of time for a wallet team to grind out themselves. With blinks it can be done in a fraction of the time.
We’re also using blinks to bring 1-click, no-rediect CTAs to our Alerts Stack, used by teams like Jupiter. Top up your collateral, avoid liquidation, take profits. Right from the notification.
Or AI agents can use blinks as a standard transaction backend to integrate more capabilities faster.
These are just 3 surfaces. There are so many more. Blockchain links as I see them are a critical, missing piece to deliver on the promise of composability in crypto. They are the 4th piece alongside shared state (the blockchain), shared action language (the tx), & shared auth (the wallet): they are the APIs to make integrations, & composability, actually buildable.
Blinks are an inevitable technology, one that Twitter & every other big platform should natively integrate, with no extension tricks. But that’s a much longer road. For now, we’re focused on solving real problems for the teams who get it & are bought in to our mission.
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