Part of the RootstockCollective Builder Spotlight series, giving visibility to the grantee projects building on Bitcoin’s most secure network.
If you’ve ever posted a link on X to drive traffic to your website or dApp, you already know the problem: the moment someone clicks that link, they leave the platform , and most of them never come back. Winks.fun, a grantee project of RootstockCollective, was built to solve exactly that.
We sat down with Atharva “AJ” Sabnis, co-founder of Winks.fun, for our latest Builder Spotlight interview to talk about the product, why Rootstock was the right ecosystem to build in, and what it’s really like to go through a Web3 grant program from application to milestone three.
Winks.fun is built by a two-person founding team with deep, complementary experience across Web3, AI, and enterprise software:
Winks.fun enables Web3 projects to embed a live, interactive mini-app directly within a post on X, eliminating the need for a link, redirect, or lost user.
As AJ explained it in our interview: “On Twitter, when you post a URL… that URL takes the user outside their social feed… What we do is that we have built a framework where you can instantly spin React applications as iframes within a tweet.”
Technically, a Wink is a Next.js and React application built in a 1,100 × 1,100px viewport, deployed with specific metadata so that X recognizes it as a platform-native application, rendering it as an interactive iframe instead of a plain link preview. Winks integrates RainbowKit and other wallet tooling depending on ecosystem needs, so users can complete on-chain actions like staking, minting, swapping, and bridging natively inside a post, without ever leaving X.
Where Winks.fun differs from developer libraries like Solana Blinks or Farcaster Frames is the delivery model: Winks.fun runs as a B2B SaaS. Protocols don’t need to write any code themselves, they simply share their use case and front-end API access, and the Winks.fun team builds, ships, and maintains the finished, fully functional Wink.
For an ecosystem, Winks translate into very concrete on-chain benefits:
When we asked AJ what made Rootstock the right network for Winks.fun, the answer wasn’t purely technical, although the fit is solid there too.
“Rootstock OG enough to be like one of the core hubs of DeFi. And DeFi is one of the very core use cases of Winks as well,” AJ told us. The prevalence of DeFi-heavy primitives on Rootstock gives Winks.fun a rich sandbox of real use cases to build and test against.
But what stood out most was the ecosystem support:
“With Rootstock, one of the biggest benefits of working with the network for us has been that the Rootstock Foundation has really helped us go and speak to several potential protocols and builders who are now becoming our customers.”
Building on Bitcoin’s longest-running and most secure network matters for a DeFi-first infrastructure product like Winks, Rootstock inherits Bitcoin’s security through merge-mining, giving projects and users confidence that the actions happening inside a tweet are happening on trustworthy infrastructure. Combine that with an active governance community and a foundation that actively opens doors, and it’s easy to see why Winks chose Rootstock over ecosystems oriented around other verticals.
Before joining RootstockCollective as a grantee, Winks.fun built every integration manually, one custom build per protocol. The grant funding for projects like theirs exists precisely to change that equation: instead of one-off work, the team used the grant to build a templatized, open-source SDK that lets any developer on Rootstock spin up their own Wink with minimal effort.
AJ described the process as highly collaborative, not just transactional:
Two milestones in, Winks.fun has shipped the foundation of the SDK and built three to four reference Winks of its own, essentially a “Squarespace for Winks,” giving other Rootstock builders working examples to build from rather than starting from scratch.
Winks is currently live on X, and the team is now bringing it beyond X to Discord and Telegram. Longer term, the roadmap includes:
AJ’s biggest lesson from the grant process is one every new builder should hear: narrow your scope.
“My first proposal was massive… but then we had a few calls with the team and it became very apparent that we needed to focus and drill down to the most essential components… only build the must-haves. The purpose of a grant is just to get you started.”
His advice for anyone preparing a grant proposal:
If you’re running a protocol on Rootstock and want a direct, frictionless way to convert Crypto Twitter into on-chain users, Winks.fun wants to hear from you, no technical lift required on your end, just the use case and API access. Reach out to the Winks.fun team to explore what a Wink could look like for your project.
Drop your email on the contact form at the bottom of the page and the WInks.fun team will get back to you: https://www.winks.fun/
Winks.fun is one example of how RootstockCollective’s grants program turns a focused idea into real, ecosystem-wide infrastructure, funding for projects that deliver measurable value to builders and users across Rootstock.
If you’re working on a web3 project and want funding, community support, and direct access to an engaged base of delegates and builders, the Grants program is open now.
Learn more about eligibility, funding tiers, and how to apply: RootstockCollective Grants
Explore the ecosystem: app.rootstockcollective.xyz