Solana Foundation Unveils Tools for Cryptocurrency Payment Integration

The Solana Foundation has launched tools enabling any website or application to become a gateway for cryptocurrency payments and other blockchain operations.

Solana Foundation Head of Ecosystem Engineering @jnwng on Solana Actions and blinks https://t.co/0dTdPHbf56

— Solana Foundation (@SolanaFndn) June 25, 2024

The Solana Actions solution is a set of API that allows blockchain transactions to be previewed, signed, and sent in various contexts. These contexts can include QR codes, buttons, or widgets in mobile and desktop applications, as well as websites.

“Actions simplify the integration for developers, allowing what you can do in the Solana ecosystem to be embedded directly into your environment, enabling on-chain actions without needing to switch to another application or webpage,” the description states.

The tool named blinks is one way to interact with Actions. It allows any action on Solana to be turned into a shareable public link. This means any digital path that can be displayed as a URL becomes a starting point for transactions on Solana.

Possible use cases for blinks cited by the Solana Foundation include:

• facilitating donations for content creators on social media without the need for complex wallet setups;
• creating custom NFTs or participating in governance voting directly from a URL.

The organization cautioned that using Actions and blinks is akin to connecting a wallet to dapps, so it is advisable to use trusted sites for security. The Solana Foundation has whitelisted the domains of partners launching the tools.

Projects within the ecosystem supporting these solutions include Cubik, Sanctum, Tensor, Realms, Access, Jupiter, Helium, Truffle, Helius, Phantom, and Backpack.

Back in February, a team of experts led by journalist Colin Wu concluded that the cause of Solana’s periodic outages was its inability to handle the growing volume of transactions.

In April, developers updated the software as part of efforts to address blockchain congestion issues.