Solana Actions & Blinks
Introduction
Solana introduced two key concepts to enhance user experience and expand blockchain accessibility: Actions and Blinks. These features streamline the interaction with blockchain transactions, making them more accessible and easier to integrate into various digital environments.
Solana Actions: The Transaction Is Coming To You
Solana Actions are a set of APIs that simplify how users transact on Solana.
In detail, they are specification-compliant APIs designed to facilitate blockchain transactions on the Solana network. These APIs return transactions that can be previewed, signed, and sent across various contexts such as QR codes, buttons, widgets, and websites.
The goal of Actions is to ensure that it is simple for developers to integrate any interaction on Solana (pay, borrow, confirm, mint) into users’ local environments, which allows users to perform transactions without having to exit their current environment.
Examples of environments include websites, mobile applications, email clients, browser extension wallets, etc.
Solana Blinks
Blinks, or blockchain links, transform any Solana Action into a shareable, metadata-rich link. These links can be distributed across the internet, allowing users to initiate Solana transactions from any environment capable of displaying a URL. Blinks effectively bring Solana Actions to a wider audience, making Solana interactions more accessible and user-friendly.
How Blinks Work:
Action-aware Clients: Blinks work with clients (such as browser extension wallets or bots) that can detect and interact with these blockchain links.
Transaction Preview: On platforms like websites, a blink can trigger an immediate transaction preview in a wallet, eliminating the need to navigate to a decentralized application.
Interactive Interfaces: In environments like Discord, a bot might convert a blink into an interactive set of buttons, facilitating easy blockchain interaction.
The Difference Between Actions and Blinks
Actions are APIs that enable the construction of complex transaction messages incorporating both on-chain and off-chain business logic. These transactions can be previewed, signed, and sent by the client, and can be initiated through native buttons, QR codes, or URLs.
Blinks, on the other hand, are a specific way to interact with Actions by transforming them into shareable, metadata-rich URLs. This allows users to execute blockchain transactions directly from these URLs, making decentralized applications accessible from any platform or device without the need for specialized interfaces.
The Lifecycle Of An Action Execution
The lifecycle of an Action execution in the Solana ecosystem closely resembles a typical REST API interaction
Initiation – the user begins by scanning a QR code which initiates an Action which triggers a request to the Action Client.
Metadata Interaction – the Action Client requests and is returned the specified metadata. The action is displayed to the user (buy, vote, mint, etc).
Action – the user selects the action, the client makes a POST request to the endpoint to get the transaction for the user to sign.
Signing – the UI in the local environment shows the transaction details and the user then approves the transaction.
Execution – the transaction is signed and executed on-chain.
Why are Solana Actions and Blinks Useful?
Seamless integration into the users local environment massively reduces the complexity of interacting with blockchains while also massively expanding Solanas reach and accessibility. This is a material upgrade to the Solana UX
Practical Applications
Examples of Solana Actions:
Staking SOL: Helping to secure the Solana network by staking SOL tokens.
E-commerce: Enabling retail stores to accept crypto payments via QR codes.
Gaming: Facilitating in-game purchases and trades using blockchain assets.
Examples of Blinks:
Social Media Tipping: Allowing users to tip content creators without complex wallet setups.
NFT Minting: Enabling users to mint NFTs or participate in governance votes directly from their local environment.
Community Voting: Letting users vote on policies via links in newsletters.
Disclaimer:
The information and services above are not intended to and shall not be used as investment advice.
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