EthGlobal: Building a Multichain Blink Engine

At the recent EthGlobal hackathon in Singapore, the Adamik team tackled the challenge of developing a cutting-edge solution to bring mass adoption to multiple blockchain ecosystems. We focused on enhancing the multichain experience by leveraging the "blinks" concept—originally promoted by Solana—and expanding it to work across other networks.

What are Solana Blinks?

Solana "blinks" are blockchain links that allow users to perform on-chain actions—such as payments, voting, or NFT purchases—directly from URLs. These links can be shared across platforms like text messages, social media, or chat apps, enabling transactions without a dedicated decentralized app (dApp). Blinks are part of Solana Actions, which provide APIs for integrating blockchain functions into various environments, making Web3 interactions more accessible and user-friendly across the internet.

For more details, check the full description here.

What We Built

The centerpiece of our project was a multichain "blinks" engine, designed to seamlessly integrate transactions and interactions across multiple blockchain ecosystems within Web 2 platforms. While "blinks" initially gained traction within the Solana ecosystem, we saw the potential to broaden this functionality, allowing users to leverage this mechanism on other networks.

In this video, you'll be able to see our multichain blink generator, as well as the result in terms of look and feel when such a blink is posted on Twitter.

How does it work?

Solana blinks were announced with much fanfare and promised to bring a massive wave of adoption and usage. But ask yourself… have you ever seen such a blink within your Twitter feed?

If you haven't, don't be afraid—you're not alone. There was a significant difference between the official announcement of Solana blinks and how they actually work. To see blinks (whether made by Solana Labs or Adamik), you need to inject code into the web page you're visiting. You read that right: Blinks are invisible on Twitter without a browser extension. That's probably why you never saw one in the first place.

For this hackathon, we built an Adamik Chrome extension whose role is to flag any "blink" within a web page and dynamically swap them for a blink "widget" where we could easily embed blockchain transaction logic.

For wallet connectivity, we reused some work from the Adamik open-source app. And obviously, we leveraged the Adamik API for easy multichain transaction crafting capability.

Now that you know the mystery behind how blinks work, it loses some of its appeal, doesn't it?

Key Learnings

1. Adamik API Flexibility: One of the standout realizations was the ease with which the Adamik API enabled cross-chain expansion. This reaffirmed our commitment to providing a unified API that simplifies blockchain interactions.

2. Solana's Blinks Limitations: Despite the initial buzz around Solana's "blinks," our deep dive into the concept revealed that it might not gain as much traction as expected. Nonetheless, our effort to adapt and enhance "blinks" for other ecosystems was a step forward in improving blockchain interoperability.

What's Next

The insights gained from the hackathon will guide our future developments as we aim to provide robust solutions that scale across ecosystems. We won't be pursuing the multichain blink engine much further, but we're definitely happy for the opportunity to hack at EthGlobal and learned a lot from this experience.

Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to push the boundaries of what's possible in the blockchain space!

Next stop: Vierzon Blockchain Hackathon!