With the consecutive releases of Actions, Blinks, and ZK Compression, is Solana becoming the leader in L1 technology innovation?

Introduction

Recently, the Crypto market has caused panic among investors due to the Mtgox compensation and the selling-off by the governments of the United States and Germany. The majority of Tokens have experienced a decline of more than 20%, but there are also some Tokens that have remained relatively ‘strong’, and SOL is one of them. As a public chain project, Solana adopts a Consensus Mechanism that combines Delegated Proof of Stake (PoS) and Proof of History (PoH). It introduces the Timestamp mechanism and utilizes multi-threaded parallel processing and state compression technology, allowing Solana to have the advantages of high throughput and low Transaction Cost.

Solana has successively released three major innovative technologies: Actions, Blinks, and ZK Compression, enabling it to expand into the SocialFi field and further compressing the existing Transaction Cost significantly. These three new technologies will power Solana’s future development, creating new expectations for the market, coupled with the application for spot ETF, which fills the future expectations and narratives of Solana with imagination.

Actions

Definition

The official documentation of Solana defines Actions as an API that allows websites to interact with the Solana blockchain to achieve on-chain activities such as transfers, voting, and donations. It is a compliant API that returns on-chain transactions of the Solana blockchain, which can be previewed, signed, and sent in various contexts, including QR codes, buttons + widgets (user interface elements), and websites on the internet.

Using non-technical language to explain Actions, it is a collection of pre-set transactions to be signed within Solana, allowing users to execute blockchain transactions without navigating to different applications or web pages. Actions are an abstract description of Solana’s on-chain transaction processing mechanism, containing instructions for executing various tasks such as transaction processing, contract execution, and data operations. Users can send various transaction instructions through Actions, such as on-chain asset transfers and purchasing Token assets. Meanwhile, developers can also use Actions to call and execute Smart Contracts, implementing complex on-chain logic.

The emergence of Actions has made Solana network application development and user transactions more convenient, while also providing support for on-chain smart contract execution and laying a solid foundation for Solana’s entry into the SocialFi field.

Workflow diagram of Actions (data source: )

Advantages

Efficient processing: Solana’s main advantage over other public chains is its high performance. In terms of design and adoption of Actions, Solana still maintains the concept of high performance. Solana uses a technology called Turbo Transactions, which utilizes long CPU cores to process transactions in parallel, further improving the network’s throughput and execution speed. When processing Actions, it enables them to be quickly executed in a large-scale network while still maintaining efficiency and stability.

Low latency network: Benefiting from Solana’s high-performance Actions processing, the latency will also be very low, providing users with a smoother and more efficient trading experience. This low-latency advantage also provides developers with longer opportunities to build more complex and interactive applications for Actions, without worrying about network latency affecting user experience, making the entire ecosystem stronger and more competitive.

Greater Flexibility: Through Actions, users can invoke Smart Contracts, perform various complex business logic, and perform functions such as data storage and retrieval. This flexibility makes Actions a powerful tool that meets various user needs in the blockchain field. In addition, Actions also support extensions, allowing users to customize them according to their own needs, further enhancing their flexibility and applicability.

Blinks

Definition

According to Solana’s official Twitter, Blinks are defined as a new primitive that converts on-chain operations into shareable links on the Block chain. Blinks can convert any Solana Actions into a shareable link with rich metadata. Blinks allow clients that support Actions (browser extension Wallet, robot) to display more functionality for users. Client applications that support Blinks only need to detect URLs compatible with Actions, parse them, and allow users to interact with them in a standardized user interface.

In layman’s terms, Blinks are a concrete manifestation of Actions, which can take the form of a QR code, a URL, a clickable button, and so on. Blinks can transform any Solana Actions into any dissemination method on any information platform, allowing clients that detect Actions (such as browser extension Wallets, bots, etc.) to display additional functionality to users. When using Blinks, users do not need to enter the Dapp behind the concrete manifestation (which can be a QR code, URL, etc.) to perform specific tasks on the current platform page, making the interaction extremely convenient and simple.

Blink working principle schematic

The relationship between Actions and Blinks is not separate, but symbiotic. Actions are the foundation of Blinks’ existence, while Blinks are the concrete manifestation of Actions. Blinks abstractly present Actions to users, making them even feel unaware of its existence when using Actions.

Advantages

Enhance user experience: Through Blinks, users no longer need to exit the current page to enter the Dapp page they want to operate, providing users with one-stop operation services, greatly reducing the user’s operating links and operating difficulties, making it as simple as the basic operation of opening a link in Web 2.

Increased traffic on Solana: After various project development teams on Solana started using Blinks, the most significant effect is the ability to drive traffic to Solana on various social platforms. In the Web 3 world, projects can only win in fierce competition by obtaining more traffic. Blinks can materialize various actions in various forms, which can be forwarded on various information exchange platforms, such as Twitter, Discord, Telegram, etc. The spread of Blinks on these platforms will bring in huge traffic for Solana, thereby promoting the ecological development of Solana.

drop the threshold for users to participate in Web 3: Users in traditional Web 2 generally do not understand basic on-chain operations such as Wallet authorization signatures, on-chain transfers, Gas fees, etc. In order to achieve rapid diversion, it is necessary not only to divert from traditional platforms, but also to drop the threshold for on-chain operations. After using Blinks, it can abstractly integrate the processes behind each specific operation into a URL, allowing users to simply click on it without understanding the principles and processes behind the operations.

Disadvantages

Increased risk of fraud: Currently, Blinks can only be retweeted on Twitter, which is already an environment filled with fraud. Before the existence of Blinks, scammers would use high-quality imitation websites or other virus injections to deceive victims and obtain their assets. With the introduction of Blinks, the efficiency of fraud has greatly increased and the cost of fraud has dropped. Scammers no longer need to develop high-quality imitation websites, but can simply use an image and a link to complete all previous operations. This method makes it difficult for users to defend against.

Unable to cover the mobile client: At present, the use of Blinks can only be limited to the computer side, but the most popular way to use Twitter now is still the mobile side, with the computer side accounting for a relatively small proportion. Therefore, some investors doubt that the diversion effect of Blinks on Solana is not as high as imagined, and it is just a gimmick used for price speculation.

ZK Compression

Definition

Solana’s official documentation defines ZK Compression as a new fundamental feature built on Solana that helps developers and users build applications at scale. Developers and users can choose to compress on-chain states, reducing state costs by several orders of magnitude, while maintaining the security, performance, and composability of Solana L1.

Technical Analysis

In all on-chain projects, developers face two basic costs - computational costs and state costs. By minimizing these two costs as much as possible, the gas cost problem of the entire chain will be solved, thereby attracting more users and developers.

Solana, with a hybrid Consensus Mechanism of Delegated Proof of Stake (PoS) and Proof of History (PoH), introduces a Timestamp mechanism and uses multi-thread parallel processing, enabling Solana to have the advantage of high throughput and low Transaction Cost, thus solving the problem of computational cost. The emergence of ZK Compression is a good solution to the state cost problem.

ZK Compression uses a process called state compression, which allows developers to utilize Solana’s ledger space in a more economical way, rather than expensive account space, to store certain types of data. ZK Compression stores the hash value of off-chain data on-chain, while storing the specific data off-chain and verifying it using a state tree. The application of this technology can effectively reduce the demand for on-chain storage space, thereby reducing costs and improving overall scalability. By adopting ZK Compression technology, the Solana ecosystem can handle large amounts of data more efficiently and provide developers with more flexible storage options, driving the development and innovation of blockchain applications.

We analyze ZK Compression in a more accessible way and break it down into parts:

• Compression represents compression, and this step achieves on-chain account storage of only the state root. The basic data is stored in the ledger under the cheaper Solana chain, thereby achieving the goal of reducing the cost of storing the drop state.
• ZK refers to the protocol that uses ZK technology to ensure the integrity of compressed states. Users and developers can obtain validity proof from RPC providers that support ZK compression. When achieving on-chain and off-chain interactions through ZK technology, ZK technology is more reliable and faster than OP technology, ensuring that Solana does not affect its high computing speed.

Working Principle

The working principle of ZK Compression is very simple, very similar to the Rollup method in ETH L2.

1. ZK Compression will compress the data of each account into a hash value, and this hash value is stored in the leaf Node of the state tree. Each accounthash not only contains the information of the account itself, but also its position in the state tree. In this way, each accounthash is unique, making it convenient for later indexing.
2. The state root of each state tree will be stored on Solana’s Mainnet. This state root is like a fingerprint of the entire tree, and by verifying this fingerprint, you can confirm that all the data in the entire tree is complete and unaltered.
3. The detailed data of each account is not directly stored on Solana’s Mainnet, but is stored as call data in the cheaper Solana ledger space. Solana’s Mainnet only stores the state root and some basic Metadata, which saves storage costs and ensures data security. And to ensure the integrity of these compressed data, ZK Compression also uses Zero-Knowledge Proof, which can prove the authenticity and integrity of the data without revealing the specific content of the data.

Although intuitively ZK Compression seems to be a Rollup in the ETH realm L2, Vitalik defines ZK Compression as a stateless client architecture. So, ZK Compression is essentially an optimization of the internal storage structure of L1.

Summary

Solana has successively proposed three technological innovations, Actions, Blinks, and ZK Compression, within two weeks, which shows that Solana has always been pursuing the development concept of faster and more convenient application of public chains. The application of these three new technologies not only expands Solana’s application scope from transactions to socializing, but also demonstrates Solana’s continuous innovation and enterprising ability in public chain technology.

These three new technologies are currently only in the testing phase, and the specific effects will only be known after large-scale application. However, judging from their price performance, investors are full of expectations for their prospects. Solana has developed into a leading force in the innovation of public chain technology.