TL; DR
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If you can paste/embed a link on a web2 platform, you can allow users to interact with your web3 app or game without ever leaving the platform (which means web3 now has web2-style distribution options ).
Full story
We need to call some people…
And those people are ourselves.
When we wrote yesterday about the Ethereum and Solana ecosystems matching up one by one in many a feature update, we went over the launch of Solana’s new ‘Blinks’ feature a bit.
Here’s the Oprah patented “ah ha” we just had (24 hours later):
Last week we wrote about ‘Hamster Kombat’ — the Telegram-based game that has now attracted 200 million users since March.
A few days later we continued talking about how web2 companies (like Telegram) have the biggest opportunity on web3 because they have built a distribution that extends far beyond any web3-native apps/platforms.
…but so far we have not been able to combine these two stories with the arrival of Solana Blinks.
Hamster Kombat is (apparently) a fun game, easily accessible to Telegram’s 900 million monthly active users through the app.
Web3 apps/games don’t have that kind of distribution power.
(For example: the leading ETH and SOL wallets, MetaMask and Phantom, have a combined monthly active user base of 37 million).
But features like Blinks get around that hurdle by pulling out of distribution from existing Web2 platforms.
If you can paste/embed a link on a web2 platform, you can allow users to interact with your web3 app or game: without ever leaving the platform.
(Just like Telegram).
The huge opportunity is:
Building on Solana, you can now surpass Telegram’s reach of 900 million monthly active users simply by posting your game to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit – or hey, even Telegram itself.
Now – there’s still a big catch:
Users of these web2 platforms still need a Solana wallet, like Phantom, to interact with the game or app… so there’s still friction.
But chances are that the social proof (aka: people who see these apps/games) everywhere on their timeline) offered by these major web2 platforms will drive wallet adoption to the right.
It’s as if web3 technology just found a side door to web2!