The Solana Foundation has debuted a feature to help connect its blockchain to any website via a shareable link.

Called blockchain links, or blinks, users can perform a whole suite of functions ranging from voting, donating, minting, swapping, and paying on the internet without the involvement of a third-party application.

To break it down further, blinks transform on-chain actions into shareable links. Solana actions can be initiated on practically every platform, website, and app where links can be shared.  

Chalking out the real-life use cases, a recent Solana announcement highlighted,

Request a payment in a text message. Vote on governance in a chatroom. Buy an NFT on social media. It’s all possible. Blinks are just regular links, with superpowers.

The foundation has also released another interlinked feature called 'Solana Action.' This feature simplifies signing and sending transactions via native apps, mobile buttons, scannable QR codes, and shareable blinks.

Solana Pay transactions will now also fall under the ‘action’ bracket. It should be noted that actions are not specific to payments.

They encapsulate deeds like topping up accounts before a margin call, staking SOL, enabling e-commerce websites to accept crypto payments directly from the product page, etc.

If one clicks on a blink without having a blockchain wallet extension like Backpack or Phantom, the underlying link will direct users to a website and behave like a usual link.

Actions and blinks are similar to ‘connecting’ wallets to dApps. The team asserted.

‍“Trust the sites you know and use, just as you trust the dApps you know and use.“

Protocol and developer stack Dialect is behind the tooling that powers actions.

The crypto community seemed excited about the latest development and lauded the foundation and others involved for finding the right product-market fix, merging Web2 with Web3, and fostering chain abstraction.