Editor's Note: This article was written on December 13 when the Blinks ecosystem saw a surge in popularity due to Griffain. This morning, another flagship project in the Blinks ecosystem, SEND, also experienced a sudden spike in value due to SendAI, with its market cap increasing over 10x overnight, peaking at $170 million. From Griffain to Blink, SendAI's organization of the Solana AI Hackathon and a bunch of applications returning to the public eye all foreshadow the new form of the Blink ecosystem: AI+Blinks.

Ever since Solana announced the first AI hackathon, market attention has shifted back to Solana, with Griffain reaching a market cap of $300 million, propelling Blink to nearly 300x gains in 48 hours, BGG1 seeing an almost 10x increase in 24 hours, Send bringing back Arcade and AI segments, and the Blinks ecosystem poised for growth. Despite a recent pullback, it is impossible to ignore the potential it may possess, hinting that the hot summer of Blinks seems to be making a comeback in winter.

Solana AI Dark Horse, Web3 Version of Perplexity

The ultimate form of an AI-era search engine should be where the demand side presents a request, and AI directly provides results or solutions instead of giving web pages to users. Currently, both Copilot and Perplexity are working towards this vision, and there is also an artificial intelligence agent engine on the Solana chain—GriffAIn.

On November 1, Tony first released GriffAIn at the Hacking for Agentic Finance hackathon, expressing a vision to turn your ideas into an operational agent engine, quickly gaining attention from the Solana ecosystem, with Toly, vvAIfu, Jupiter, Dialect, and others all expressing support or further cooperating to improve the product. Since its official token launch on November 3, its market cap has been skyrocketing and has now surpassed $300 million, continually breaking previous highs.

If Blinks are like a model home where everything you need is inside, but what you like, you have to bring yourself, and what you dislike, you have to take out yourself.

GriffAIn, on the other hand, is a full-house bespoke service where he can fulfill whatever you desire, and all you need to do is explain your needs to him. GriffAIn will bridge the gap between demand and the Solana ecosystem, being able to meet virtually any request within the existing Solana technology framework. Whether it's sniper attacking certain qualifying tokens on Pumpfun, creating a token, buying a bottle of whiskey with Solana, or issuing a Blink NFT on Twitter for your fans to mint.

Currently, only users holding the Sage phone can use it. Users can activate GriffAIn through Mint GriffAIn's Saga Genesis Token, and GriffAIn now also supports mobile devices.

The Same Founder Suddenly Discovered by "Value": Blinkdotfun

In September 2016, a young man from San Francisco State University pushed open the doors of the Uber company. And if it weren't for the unexpected, you might never have known him until recently when the token of his project on the Solana chain surpassed a market value of $250 million. He is Tony Plasencia, the Founder of Graffin.

Unlike other cryptocurrency founders who often hide their personal information, you can easily find any information about him online, and you can still see his views on various social phenomena on Medium even now. After leaving Uber, he participated in and invested in many startups, including the American home services website thumbtack and the meal ordering platform ritual, both of which were well known VC investments.

After many twists and turns, he founded his first blockchain project in 2022 (Underdog Protocol). Although it now appears to be a platform for codeless issuance of NFTs, Blinks, and SPL Tokens, the initial intention of the project was to tokenize the individual's future for funding, somewhat resembling the Human Agent investment platform. Although this project did not cause a big stir in the market, it was his first step into blockchain entrepreneurship.

Those who have been involved in the Solana ecosystem in the middle of this year will surely be impressed by Blinks. Blinks consist of two parts: Actions (Solana Actions) and Blinks (BlockchAIn links). Actions provide compliant APIs to quickly complete transfers, execute smart contracts, and other operations with high efficiency and low latency, suitable for various application scenarios. Blinks then convert Actions into shareable links, allowing users to directly preview and trigger on-chain transactions on web pages or social platforms.

And at that time, fueled by market FOMO, Blinks spawned various products, such as Polymarket on X, where users could directly sign multisig wallets through Blinks in private messages, engage in gaming, tipping, and other types of products.

Related Reading:

1. "Launched for 7 Days, Briefly Describing the 22 Use Cases Already on Solana Blinks"

2. "Solana's Version of "Mini Programs": Teaching You How to Use Blinks on the X Platform"

Tony, who has deeply cultivated the Solana ecosystem, certainly did not miss this opportunity. He and his team developed a platform at that time to launch Blinks tokens and NFTs — Blinkdotfun. By locking Sol used for token trading in a Bonding Curve to reflect the token's market value fluctuation, users could share links on X to allow others to directly buy or sell tokens on X, turning X into their launch platform.

The platform's issued token, "Blink," also experienced market FOMO at the time. Although the heat of the Blinks ecosystem in the market gradually faded, the market value of Blink once dropped to $100,000.

Amidst the recent skyrocketing market value of GriffAIn, "Blink" was rediscovered in value. Within 48 hours, its market value surged by a factor of 300, surpassing $30 million before the deadline. This propelled the entire Blink ecosystem back to a frenzy. Even though it sounds a bit confusing with all the talk about blink this and blink that, in the blink of an eye, Blink found a new path — Blinks+AI.

Blinks+AI, Making the Market Blink Again

Solana has quickly become the gateway for most new developers entering the blockchain space in 2024, attracting them through what I believe, besides memecoin, is Goat's AI agent fundraising in October through pumpfun. From a certain perspective, this is an AI singularity point that has attracted many AI developers to thrive in this land.

Within a short period of time on Solana, a massive number of AI agents have emerged, many of which are experimental in nature. The excellent chain liquidity and robust developer community have given Solana developers a sense of relaxation where they can act on their ideas first and figure things out later. It's not an exaggeration to call it the most imaginative AI Agent petri dish in the world.

At this point in time, Solana has done two things:

The first is reviving the Blink ecosystem using GriffAIn as a case study for Blink+AI agent. Bringing about a true "Agentic app szn" requires not only AI but also a channel of infrastructure.

The second thing is taking the community NFT project SEND that was previously launched on Blinks, dressing it up in new AI clothing, and transforming it into "SendAI" together. They have invited an all-star lineup to host the first Solana AI hackathon, with the event poster listing the 6 areas of AI agent they are looking to audit.

Therefore, bridging the gap between the two ecosystems' developers: Blink ecosystem developers are responsible for developing new applications and integrating Solana's on-chain features with external platforms or apps, strengthening cross-platform interoperability between platform influence and Solana upstream to midstream.

Meanwhile, AI Agent developers only need to unleash all their imagination to find possible use cases for users. One is responsible for the supply side, infrastructure, and channels, while the other is responsible for direct user interaction. A complete developer ecosystem cycle is thus established.

And because Blink is simple enough, being just a string of address or QR code, it can be easily embedded into AI functionality. Therefore, users no longer need to switch to another scenario but only need a single sentence.

So, don't blink, the next version of AI is right here.

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