WTF are Blinks?

Blinks, or Blockchain Links, let developers distribute product experiences everywhere. They are designed around a simple principle: given the choice, consumers will always opt to click less to get things done, that faster action is better.

Unfortunately, this is not how the internet works today. When presented with a call to action — whether that’s a marketing email, a friend sharing a link to do something in an app — a user must leave where they are, open a new page or app, and complete the action elsewhere. Each of these extra steps results in drop-off.

This is one of the biggest UX challenges on the consumer internet, and its largest opportunity. The best product teams obsess over reducing the time to take an action inside their own apps to an absolute minimum. But what about the attrition that happens between products? Some of the most successful consumer founders, like Nikita Bier, have used clever workarounds — exploiting operating system quirks and deep-linking tricks — to teleport app experiences into the environments where users already are.

Developers and the startup community universally celebrate these growth hacks, and when done well, they feel like magic to users. But it’s 2025, these shouldn’t be tricks. It should be table stakes. Products and users clearly want this.

Blinks are a new standard for distributing product experiences. They execute actions natively within the environments they already use. They are a uniquely-blockchain technology, but as blockchain eats the internet, and wallets are used to power more and more of our daily lives, blinks will as well.

Today, nearly 600 blinks are live, powering experiences for the leading names in crypto. Users can swap with Jupiter and Uniswap, earn with Jito, Lulo, and Drift, buy and collect with Magic Eden and Tensor, predict with Hedgehog and more. Blinks are natively embedded in Backpack, shareable on X via Phantom, integrated into explorers like Solscan, and accessible through AI agents like Griffain and other agent kits.

But crypto is just the start. Imagine a future where you can:

• Pay your credit card bill directly from your Gmail inbox.
• Place a bet on a game with your friends inside iMessage or WhatsApp.
• Buy a sports ticket instantly on Barstool Sports.

At Dialect we’re on a mission to organize the internet’s experiences, and make them distributable and actionable everywhere. We build the technology layer that powers the blink ecosystem, enabling developers to discover, onboard, manage, and track these experiences.

Blinks accelerate development, onchain interoperability

Distributing product experiences isn’t new — developer tools and widgets enable cross-app interactions across the internet. Stripe powers credit card checkouts, Moonpay offers “Buy Now” buttons to buy tokens, and music from Spotify can be played directly from Slack, iMessage, and other apps.

The problem is the developer experience. Many of these integrations are performed via client-side SDKs that involve hundreds or thousands of lines of bespoke code. SDKs for onchain protocols put even more logic and responsibility on the client SDK because they interact directly with the blockchain. This results in more complex integrations than typically found in web2, which are often lightweight wrappers for logic that live behind APIs.

APIs for the Blockchain

Blockchain links solve this problem by moving protocol SDKs into APIs. Clients then make requests to these APIs to receive ready-to-sign transactions in a fraction of the code. Where SDKs often require the stepwise construction of protocol-specific data types and dependent logic, blinks inputs are at most a set of simple URL query parameters. The result is integrations that can be as simple as a few lines of code.

Automagic interfaces

Blinks also go beyond API-based transaction construction, and assist in the creation of user interfaces. While purely headless — blinks do not return front end code like HTML, CSS or Javascript — they do allow developers to return data that can be used to build interfaces. This includes things like text to render on buttons, as well as the construction of more advanced input types like text fields, select menus, and education information like titles, descriptions, images and more. With the help of client-side libraries like Dialect’s blinks SDKs, entirely self-sufficient, standalone interfaces can be unfurled simply by specifying the blockchain link URL.

The result is ready-to-use, full consumer experiences in orders-of-magnitude less code, whether those experiences are link preview-like cards for sharing on social media platforms, or the targeted integration of a single button at the right, high-intent place in a product. In other words, blinks, together with Dialect’s blinks SDKs, make protocol integrations comparable in speed to best-in-class web2 integrations like Stripe or Intercom, and sometimes faster.

Blinks standardize development across integrations

What makes blockchain links truly unique, however, is the level of standardization they offer across integrations. Unlike Stripe or Intercom, each of which is its own specific integration, blinks offer a standard for integration that is virtually identical no matter the provider being integrated.

In the most general sense, a developer may integrate Dialect’s SDKs once — doable in just minutes — and they will now have the ability to unfurl any blockchain link for use in their product. For more specific integrations, where a developer is working to place a specific button or CTA in a specific place in their product, blinks still conform to a standard data and transaction construction interface that can dramatically reduce the time to perform each targeted integration. A developer integrating blinks is working with a single client UI SDK, a predictable API and schema for interaction, and an efficiently-discoverable set of inputs for each blink.

In other words, Blinks are the uber widget. They are a kind of a decentralized Zapier for the blockchain.

But characteristics of crypto, blockchain and onchain components take this concept of programmable, composable APIs to new heights of efficiency and interoperability. Blockchains — with their globally accessible shared data layer (the blockchain itself), universal language for execution (the transaction), and self-sovereign authentication (the wallet) — are much more natural benefactors of a universal communication standard: blinks are the critical fourth piece for solving the composability puzzle.

Blinks increase distribution, retention & LTV

Every consumer product is either trying to acquire new users or maximize the value of its existing ones. Platforms like exchanges, mobile wallets, and explorers already have millions of monthly active users but need more engaging experiences to retain them. Meanwhile, new onchain protocols and applications are struggling to reach these users and need distribution channels.

The primary challenge for consumer products that offer experiences to their users is deepening what they can make available. They have just begun to offer deeper onchain experiences, making more complex financial instruments and yield-bearing experiences like staking available for the first time. But these experiences are costly partnerships that take time to broker and integrate. The promise, of course, is that the right integrations will make compelling new experiences available to their users, increasing retention and overall revenue generated. But too much guessing needs to be made upfront on which experiences those will be. Blinks streamline this process, by making each integration dramatically easier to perform, and wiring in economic incentives out of the box.

On the other side of the market, products that don’t have distribution are invariably trying to get it. Blinks give these products the technical ability, and economic incentive to get it. A team building a new onchain protocol can build their app from the ground up using blinks — powering the key buttons and interactions in their own app using blinks — and as a result, those product experiences will be default-sharable and integrable. They will then be able to register these experiences, and tie economic incentives to them like out-of-the-box revenue share, and make them discoverable by the platforms integrating blinks.

Take Backpack’s Mobile Wallet as an example. From a new section in Backpack, users can discover, and use, a curated list of Solana’s top products — to earn, buy, collect, vote, and more — all with one-click simplicity, without ever leaving Backpack. Read more here.

Consumer success is a punishing power law distribution, where only the biggest global brands reach any level of success.

Our bet is that blockchain links are like Shopify for software, and will allow a new generation of small- and medium-sized consumer software companies to surive, and thrive, without needing to gain distribution levels like Facebook or Tiktok.

Enter Dialect

All great open source technologies have great technology companies built on top of them. The W3C browser spec has Chrome and Google, OAuth has Okta, git has Github. These companies solve myriad problems with and around the open technology, making them actually usable in production.

At Dialect we are building the technology company for blockchain links. Today, we offer open source SDKs for building and integrating blinks, which are now used by many of the biggest companies in Crypto, from Phantom to OKX and ByBit.

We are also building the platform for searching, distributing and integrating blinks. The down-stream consequences for blinks — i.e. product integrations via URL — have barely been explored. Our new platform, in private beta now, lets teams deliver entire product experiences into their app fully remotely via a dashboard, and then measure the performance of those experiences once deployed. Individuals from across an entire organization — from engineering to product, marketing and growth — can launch and manage integrations with zero code, promoting the integrations that perform, and experimenting to find new ones.

Additionally, in the coming weeks we will be working with teams across both sides of the blinks market to enable revenue share for the first time using blinks, to create a kind of ad network for experiences.

At Dialect, we’re on a mission to organize the internet’s experiences, make them distributable and actionable everywhere. Blinks are the language for the distribution of those experiences. Blinks flip the internet upside-down, let products navigate to their users, and create the economic backbone to power it.

Dialect is backed by leading investors including Multicoin Capital, Foundation Capital, Electric Capital, Y Combinator, Raj Gokal and Anatoly Yakovenko from Solana, and others.

You can reach us at hello@dialect.to and www.dialect.to