What is Mirror?

Basic functions of Mirror

“Recapturing” the ownership of content

The team that created Mirror defined the project’s goal as: “Using the tools provided by crypto technology to empower creators and redefine publishing online.” Mirror’s biggest innovation is decentralization, which differs from traditional content platforms such as Twitter and Telegram. It allows users to truly “own” their own articles and obtain corresponding revenue without being exploited by traditional centralized traffic platforms, which is also in line with the core connotation of Web 3.0.

Entries

Mirror opens its content publishing function to all users who only need to connect an Ethereum wallet to get started.

Similar to traditional content creation platforms, Mirror has a regular text editing function and also supports Markdown syntax. Moreover, it also adopts the very popular concept of content blocks, with which users can insert text, video, links, etc. at will, or insert a certain NFT for real-time preview. Like Notion, the pages of the note-taking software, Mirror also makes its interface clean.

Graphic: Mirror.xyz

There are some settings in the upper right corner of the content publishing page, allowing users to set the publishing form of the article, and set the price and quantity of the article’s Funding. After the content is published, it will be stored on Arweave, the distributed storage chain permanently, which needs users to pay a certain gas fee. Currently, every article a user creates on Mirror can be minted as an Entries NFT on the Optimism chain. Users can set their prices and supplies, and other fan readers can “collect” these articles to support their favorite authors.

Graphic: Mirror.xyz

Mirror’s editing experience is close to some Web 2.0 platforms. Users can explore and complete the entire workflow from content editing to publishing following their intuition after connecting the wallet. If users are still not satisfied with the editing experience of Mirror, they can use the tool to import from external sources such as Medium. As a decentralized platform where there is no censorship or sensitive words, writers are able to freely create works in a true sense. Mirror is undoubtedly extremely attractive to content creators.

Though equivalent to Medium in the Web3 version, Mirror has no functions such as paywalls and recommendation algorithms, and has limited SEO support, making it difficult for excellent articles to be retrieved by search engines. Moreover, Mirror doesn’t use native data tracking methods to track articles. Therefore, creators are unable to know some related data including the number of readings of articles. They can only add the GA website to conduct analysis.

Other features at the early stage

In addition to supporting basic editing and writing functions, Mirror was a community collaboration content platform and content crowdfunding platform that strongly supported social communication in its early stage. With its excellent properties and powerful functions, Mirror was also the main publishing platform for many DAOs. Mirror’s six basic functions are Entries, Crowdfunds, Editions, Auctions, Splits, and Token Races. However, after August 2022, Mirror focused on polishing the editing and publishing experience and officially announced that it would suspend plug-in functions including crowdfunds, NFT editions, and splits, and integrate them into the Entries, the publishing function.

Graphic: Mirror’s early functions

In terms of effectiveness, the updated Mirror is more likely to become an easy-to-use native content publishing platform in Web 3.0. However, in this article, you can still get to know about the DAO release-related functions that Mirror previously had.

Crowdfunds

Users can raise funds for projects or ideas through the Crowdfunds function on Mirror which, unlike general crowdfunding platforms, is essentially a smart contract on Ethereum. Creators can issue tokens based on the articles. These tokens are equal to shares. Those who participate in crowdfunding deposit ETH to support the creator’s writing. Accordingly, they will also receive the corresponding tokens. After a piece of work is created, creators will mint it into NFT for sale, and the previous crowdfunders can also obtain a share of revenue according to a certain mechanism.

Of course, crowdfunding projects are not limited to writing. Users can also create paintings, movies, NFTs, etc. for crowdfunding. Specifically, before initiating crowdfunding, users must introduce project details to users, as well as set crowdfunding target amounts and revenue-sharing methods. It can be said that this feature has not only changed the way content creators obtain revenue, but also greatly promoted Mirror to be used in more scenarios.

Token Race

With crowdfunding and voting features, many DAOs can be published on Mirror. Actually, those who participate in crowdfunding form a DAO when content creators initiate crowdfunding, and the tokens these creators hold represent voting rights. Mirror is relatively complete in its voting tools, including voting proposals, token snapshots, multi-signature, and proxy voting.

Many DAO startup-related functions, including Crowdfunds, have been offline on Mirror’s official website, but projects that have already been completed keep online. Users can still view the previously released crowdfunding projects on browsers including Mirror’s bress.xyz.

Graphic: bress.xyz/crowdfunds

Token Economics

Mirror.xyz is mainly built on Ethereum and Arweave. The Ethereum wallet address provides Mirror with users’ decentralized identity. There is also payment made in Ether for transactions on Mirror. Arweave serves as distributed storage which provides users with writing data. Referring to the “Play-to-Earn” mode proposed by Axie Infinity, Mirror, in the early days of the project, also had a so-called “Write-to-Earn” mode, which is one of the reasons that enables Mirror to gain great popularity.

After publishing articles on Mirror, users can get ETH rewards from supporters through the crowdfunding function, while supporters will get the corresponding tokens of the project in return. These tokens will also represent the voting rights in the DAO. Thus, Mirror at the early stage is more like a crowdfunding platform for creators than a content creation platform.

Moreover, Mirror.xyz launched WRITE, its official token, at the beginning of the project’s launch in March 2021. Users had to burn a WRITE to register a Mirror account. However, the number of WRITEs was very small at the beginning of the sale, and it was necessary for users to participate in the “writing competition” to get a chance to obtain WRITE. Each week, only ten authors with the highest rankings in user polls could get one WRITE each. Thus, it was “hard to get WRITE” on social media. Until October last year, WRITE was no longer set as a requirement to register a Mirror account. Instead, WRITE could be used to exchange for a subdomain under Mirror.xyz.

Graphic: the subdomain (dev.mirror.xyz) of Mirror’s development team

The Launch of Web 3 subscription service

Presently, the Mirror official has delisted a series of plug-in functions, including crowdfunding. Therefore, Mirror is closer to the traditional website blog in terms of its functions. However, thanks to the network effects, Mirror is favored by a growing number of crypto users since it was opened for use in October last year. Major teams, DAOs, and investors expressed their views and opinions on Mirror to promote their projects and raise funding. It has been a popular practice in Web 3 to create with Mirror.

However, Mirror doesn’t support searching for native content. But there are search engine applications of Mirror content, such as Ask Mirror and bress.xyz developed by third parties. Mirror Curator DAO will regularly select quality content and share it on its official account because the content is dispersed on Mirror and there is no recommendation algorithm to help users find articles. Meanwhile, creators themselves can also actively submit content through the Discord channel, and their works will also have the opportunity to be included in the weekly featured content.

On July 27, 2022, Mirror officially launched its Web 3 subscription service. This allows users to subscribe to any content created by creators on Mirror using their own Web 3 wallet, thus getting instant updates of content. In addition, Mirror also encourages content creators to build wallet-based user communities, including issuing tokens or NFT airdrops to subscribers, adding subscriber addresses to a whitelist, and setting up governance for subscribers only.

Caption: Ownership identification content at the end of a Mirror article includes a subscribe button, the article’s Arweave transaction, the author’s address, the article’s NFT address, and a summary of the content.

This also reflects the significant role of wallets in Web 3 social networking where the on-chain address serves as the most basic identification of users. The community established based on the wallet address is expected to replace the current community system based on email addresses and application accounts in the future. At the same time, wallets may also blur the boundaries between social and economic identities in Web 3, resulting in new business formats and models.

Conclusion

In Web 3.0, a pioneering era, imagination is the only thing that limits. As its slogan says, “Writing as usual. Publishing like never before”, Mirror has combined fan economy, NFT, DAO, and many other concepts and integrated blockchain technology in an unexpected but reasonable way into the creator economy.

Though Mirror is almost the ideal Web 3.0 we expect, it has to be said that the application of Mirror is still limited to the crypto ecosystem. Apart from Mirror, many Web 3.0 products also have to think about this question: How do we use blockchain, tokens, smart contracts, and other technologies to create value for users, thus breaking the mystery of “beautiful but useless”?