Web3 Just Found a Side Door Into Web2 (And We Totally Missed It)
TL;DR
If you can paste/embed a link on a web2 platform, you can allow users to interact with your web3 app or game — without them ever leaving the platform (which means web3 now has web2-style distribution options).
Full Story
We need to call some people out…
And those people are ourselves.
Yesterday when we wrote about the Ethereum and Solana ecosystems matching each other one-for-one in many-a-feature-update, we kinda just skimmed over the launch of Solana’s new ‘Blinks’ feature.
Here’s the Oprah patented “ah ha” we just had (24hrs after the fact):
Last week we wrote about ‘Hamster Kombat’ — the Telegram-based game that has now pulled in 200M users since March.
Then a few days later, we harped on about how web2 companies (like Telegram) have the largest opportunities in web3, because they have established distribution way beyond any web3-native apps/platforms.
…but we failed to marry these two stories with the advent of Solana Blinks, until now.
Hamster Kombat is (apparently) a fun game, which can be easily accessed by Telegram’s 900M monthly active users, via the app.
Web3 apps/game don’t have that kind of distribution power.
(E.g: the leading ETH and SOL wallets, MetaMask and Phantom, have a combined monthly active user base of 37M).
But features like Blinks steer around that hurdle by piggy backing off the distribution of 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 them ever leaving the platform.
(Just like Telegram).
The huge opportunity being:
If you’re building on Solana, you can now outcompete Telegram’s reach of 900M monthly active users, simply by posting your game to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit — or hey, even Telegram itself.
Now — there’s still a big ol’ catch:
Users of these web2 platforms will still need a Solana wallet, like Phantom, to be able to interact with the game or app…so there’s still friction.
But there’s a good chance the social proof (aka: folks seeing these apps/games everywhere on their timeline) provided by these major web2 platforms, will drive wallet adoption up and to the right.
It’s like web3 tech just found a side door into web2!