K.Erica, the first Chinese-language writer to settle in, described Mirror as a “delicate balance” between the ideas of Web2 and Web3. Indeed, as long as you have a blockchain wallet and log in, a person with experience in using Web2 products will almost know how to use Mirror. It looks like a very primitive content distribution platform. If the publishing experience is not good, there will be old users to share their experience, first edit with Medium’s editor, and then import with one click, the experience will be smoother.
When you follow the “muscle memory” to find likes, comments, and pageviews, you find that there are none of these, and instead is Collect (collection, similar to collection, but it costs a little bit of ether every time, so it also Much like “rewarding”), crowdfunding. “If I want to crowdfund, should I go to Juicebox or Mirror?” Both Mirror users told me: it doesn’t matter that much. Because, no matter where it is posted, you have to promote it yourself, to “scream”.
Collet interface at the bottom of the article
The mindset behind this question is: in the Web2 platform, when publishing any content, I will think about the “play of the platform”. Maybe this content style is more likely to be liked by users of platform A rather than platform B (maybe more importantly, the recommendation algorithm). When people say that Juicebox and Mirror are indistinguishable, they mean that in key functions, both allow fundraisers and backers to build trust at low cost. You initiate a project, set the funds, supporters express their support by injecting ether, and such a relationship is engraved on the blockchain, open and transparent, and the relationship is cast by immutable code.
But there will still be differences. If you are a content creator or artist and want to start crowdfunding for a movie, a novel or a column in the future, Mirror is obviously more friendly.
The Mirror team has publicly expressed its ambition: to redefine publishing online by empowering creators with the tools provided by encryption technology.
01
fromTwitterto Mirror:
Web3’s native content platform
Twitter has always been an important distribution center for Web3 information, and Mirror’s initial influence is also circulating among Twitter’s big V.
pictureKnow almost, Clubhouse and other Web2 products used the invitation system in the early days to establish “seed users” and “word of mouth”. In early March 2021, Mirror kicked off the process on Twitter with a “writing contest”: only the winner of the vote would become a Mirror user.
The competition itself is also a token game, and tokens mean power and identity. Mirror will issue the token $WRITE to two types of people: early members/users, and members who have applied for eligibility to enter the waitlist. Owning tokens means voting rights, those who have settled in have 1 token, and waitlist members have 0.1 tokens.
This represents different voting weights. In the weekly round of writing competitions, the top ten will receive 1 $WRITE. By burning (that is, consuming) this token, you are eligible to enter Mirror and become a member of Mirror DAO (Decentralized Organization). Mirror DAO members have the right to vote on public affairs.
The founding team thought “What is Mirror?=Who’s on Mirror?” (What is Mirror = Who’s on Mirror) Through the contest, the Mirror founding team and those who wanted to be on Mirror defined the initial content.
As the first Chinese writer to settle in, K.Erica won because of the will of the people behind her. She is the founder of Rhizome DAO, an East Asian developer organization, and GuildW, an on-chain esports team. In her spare time, she co-founded DAppChaser with several partners to introduce people to decentralized applications in the field of Web3. The voting time for the competition is 3 or 4 am Beijing time. A group of core readers set the alarm clock to get up in the middle of the night to vote, persisted for 7 or 8 weeks, and finally let her win the competition and be selected.
Mirror is first and foremost a decentralized content publishing platform. The content posted by users on Mirror is stored on the ARWAVE chain (a blockchain storage platform with a new data structure). Even if the product of Mirror disappears, users still have their own content. However, at present, due to cost, only text information is stored on the chain, and multimedia content such as images and animations are still stored in the centralized processor.
After the article is published, there will be “Arwe“ave transaction ID”, “contributor’s Ethereum address” and “content summary” appear
Seven months later, Mirror canceled the contest, opened registration to everyone, and more people started posting on Mirror. The way in which $WRITE tokens are distributed has also changed. The content selected by Mirror DAO members becomes “Good Article Focus”, and the selected person will receive 1 $WRITE.
Retired programmer Guo Yu also started using Mirror during this period. He used to be a senior technical expert of ByteDance and chose to retire and live in Japan two years ago. However, in 2022, he started his entrepreneurial gap year on Web3 and launched two projects, Checks Finance and CodeforDAO. Before using Mirror, he found a lot of it came from here while reading about the Web3 space. Naturally, he also started posting about Web3 on Mirror. It was a science fiction novel that made him selected for “Focus on Good Articles”. He also calls this “a writing experiment on Web3”. This “writing experiment” uses the NFT functionality provided by Mirror.
His novel “The Hash That Never Dies” is the first in a series of novels, and when he publishes it on Mirror and casts it into an NFT, readers can “collect” this NFT. That is, “buy” with any amount of ether (0.01ETH and above). In this way, one “marks” one’s relationship to the work, and to the writer.
The “collect” will continue to occur throughout the writing process of the novel series. Guo Yu also set another rule: when the novel is completed, he will use 25% of all NFT sales in this collection as an airdrop, which will be sent to all contributors proportionally. He also set up 10 “grand prizes” — 10 wallet addresses that would split 5% of sales equally.
Guo Yu told me that he learned about the “Haowen Selection” event when he learned that his work was selected during the trip. He burned the $WRITE coins, obtained a subdomain in Mirror, and became a member of Mirror DAO.
At present, the writing experiment based on the first novel has “sold” 4.76 ETH (ETH is ether, the current exchange rate of 1 ETH is about 7700 CNY, and the novel is published in January 2022, the exchange rate is about 24000 CNY). “In this experiment, NFTs are both an identity marker, a collectible and a redeemable asset,” he wrote on the Mirror.
02
Combinable “plays”:
NFTs, crowdfunding, forks
Just like Guo Yu’s writing experiment, Mirror hopes to allow creators to establish new production relationships through the functions provided. Writing NFT function, which can turn the entire article content into NFT. Creators own the copyright from the beginning and receive financial support based on it.
The latest functional upgrade has greatly lowered the threshold for forming a production relationship around content. When an ordinary user publishes an article, he can choose to cast the article into Writing NFT for free. The default minimum amount for tipping is 0.01 Optimistic ETH. Optimisim is a layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum. This scheme runs computations off-chain, which can reduce Ethereum gas costs by 10,000% or more, and increase throughput by 200 times, solving the problems of slow transactions and high gas costs on Ethereum. For Mirror, how to support people’s high-frequency reward and crowdfunding is a problem that the technical layer must consider.
Judging from the functions launched one after another, Mirror not only wants to be a “content publishing platform”, but also provides basic tools for various activities in the Web3 world. This can be understood as the “market” where Web3 behavior occurs. As its tagline “Creat and connect your world on Web3” states, Mirror welcomes all kinds of economic relationships to form and operate here.
A Mirror user, using simple tools, can initiate various types of crowdfunding, or directly insert NFTs into the article for auctions, use Token tools, or distribute tokens based on crowdfunding projects. These actually provide the underlying governance tools of the DAO. Forks (Splits) allow any project to have multiple collaborators, and the funds obtained from crowdfunding or rewards can flow into different wallets in proportion.
Concepts or gameplays such as crowdfunding, cooperative profit sharing, and auction NFT have all appeared in the Web3 field. Mirror makes them callable, composable tools that seem to provide a more convenient channel for people to enter the Web3 world. The existing projects of Web3 have also successively established official pages in Mirror, such as ENS, Gitcoin, Opensea… and optimism. However, at present, they mainly use Mirror as a platform for information release.
Mirror’s friendliness to content creators is obvious. The basic Writing NFT, coupled with the functions of crowdfunding and forking as plug-in functions, can allow a creator to easily establish a “production relationship” with supporters. It also hopes to help journalists and artists get involved in Web3 activities.
Web3, first developed from cryptocurrencies, has experienced a boom in financial projects, and currently lacks products that can be used by a wider range of people. It is in this dimension that Mirror is trying something.
It encourages creators to collaborate here, publish online together, auction content for revenue, and share profits. When multiple creators spontaneously collaborate in publishing, the prototype of an “organization” is naturally formed; when this spontaneously formed organization is not a “company”, DAO is a logical form, and its copyright and economic relations are formed by smart contracts at the beginning of the project. contract and operate accordingly.
This is the Media DAO envisioned by Mirror, “In the future, we assume that the creator may be the operator of a DAO that generates many works, each of which is generated as an NFT, and the ongoing revenue from transactions returns to the DAO. Therefore, the DAO’s Investors can expect more profits than the first NFT sales.”
03
From algorithms to curators,
From startup team to DAO
In the Web2 world, recommendation algorithms are the bridge between content and audience. In the Web3 world built by Mirror, the recommendation algorithm disappears, how can crowdfunding/content and supporters find each other? This is a question waiting to be explored, and Cruator (curator) is part of the answer.
The concept of Cruator (curator) comes from the art business. In the exhibition, the curator undertakes the work of selecting the exhibits and designing the way of presentation. This role is the link between the artwork and the audience, and at the same time, he is creative and explores the value of the artwork from his own unique perspective.
We can even understand the “recommendation algorithm” as the “curator” of the Web2 world. The algorithm precisely matches the content with the audience according to the set logic, thus forming the game rules of the platform. It is itself a centralized system. Online curators in the Web3 world are a third role besides content producers and consumers. It’s also diverse, and can be a team’s weekly picks, someone’s list of recommendations, or even a site that redistributes content.
The selection of good articles by Mirror DAO is a kind of curation, but it is still hosted by the core team of Mirror. The team hopes to open up this part to more people. Shawn, one of the contributors to the Mirror DAO, said: “There are a lot of requests from the community that the Mirror team has avoided. They believe that the needs of the application layer are left to the community to do. This is indeed an entrepreneurial opportunity.
What Mirror really wants is decentralized, diverse curation. This is also the entrepreneurial space in the content ecology. These “curations” recombine, share, and recommend content from specific perspectives, screen and distribute the content twice, and affect the value of the content during dissemination. Several teams have emerged to play this role.
Mirror Weekly Review (Mirror Weekly Review) is currently the product of a team, and has now run 34 issues. Operated by MC DAO, it is committed to selecting, commenting, and disseminating high-quality content and creators on Mirror.xyz, helping readers quickly understand the wonderful views of creators on the Mirror platform.
In addition, other types of “curation” include search engines such as Ask Mirror, which are used to search for content that has been published in Mirror; Bress.xyz is a “website” that re-aggregates and pushes content on Mirror (but The ultimate goal is a decentralized social platform based on the Mirror protocol).
Mirror Weekly Review
Unlike Web2, where content production, distribution, and consumption are all done on one platform, those who are able and willing to enter the “ecology” have greater autonomy. Since most of Mirror’s data is stored on the Arweave chain, those who want to develop new features can access it themselves. The Mirror team also does not need to intervene in the early stage, and then invites into the Mirror DAO when the product is mature and needs to cooperate.
At present, Mirror has not yet formed a business model, but it has obtained a 2.5% profit on the chain through NFT purchases and crowdfunding activities on Mirror. It is conceivable that the content that is cast into NFT has a defined value in circulation. When there are more and more different roles such as content creators, DAO operators, and curators, the business model will also occur and evolve.
Mirror’s passion for content and artistic creation may be related to the founder’s experience.
The founder, Denis Nazarov, is a former partner of a16z crypto, a fund focused on cryptocurrency and Web3. He is also an experienced software engineer in the open source community. However, his programming is mainly self-taught, and he graduated from New York University with a bachelor’s degree in photography and a minor in media studies. Co-founder and CTO Graeme Boy graduated from Grinnell College with a BA. Since college, he has worked as an engineer on several projects.
K.Erica described Greame’s extensive reading in humanities and social sciences, “it’s hard to find a CTO who loves and understands the value of content creation more than he does”. “collect” is set as one of the core behaviors on Mirror. When a user collects works by paying a certain amount of encrypted assets, he will appear in the list of collectors at the bottom of the article, and the content he collects will also appear on the personal page.
This means that, at the same time as the “tip”, the user is also marked as a node of the “social graph” derived from this content. In an article laying out the functionality of collect, Greame wrote that “To be a home for serious cultural creation and evaluation, Web3 may need to facilitate more than effective economic relationships.”
Mirror’s founding team has raised more than $10 million in seed funding from Union Square Ventures (USV) and Andreessen Horowitz. However, the way Mirror operates also presents a transitional form between “startup teams” and DAOs. The composition of Mirror DAO is divided into ordinary members and contributors. At present, there are 17 core contributors, who are mainly responsible for the operation of DAO, process optimization, and docking of various projects. Most of the members of Mirror DAO are members, who do not participate in daily work, and only appear when discussing governance and community voting.
For this Mirror practice, founder Denis Nazarov described it as an experiment at the intersection of “content publishing” and “value transfer”. The former has been profoundly changed by the content platform in the Web2 era; with encryption technology and financial practice, value flow has a new model. When “content” is marked as NFT, it enters the currency system. Can a new effective business model be born around its behavior? Everything awaits practice.
