The rise and fall of Mirror: From a pioneer of Web3 content revolution to a decentralized bubble

Written by: Lawrence

From Peak to Collapse: Mirror's Web3 Dream and Disillusionment

In the craze of Web3, Mirror was once regarded as the future of content creation. However, as time goes by, this pioneer platform that once led the decentralized revolution is rapidly sliding into silence.

According to data from SimilarWeb, a website traffic analysis platform, the total number of visits to Mirror's official website in the past month was 642,000, a decrease of 23.8% from the previous month, and an astonishing drop compared to its peak period - Mirror has fallen to 2183rd on the blockchain industry website rankings.

Behind all these changes lies the collapse of the decentralized dream and the cruel collision of reality. From the spark of innovation to the bursting of the bubble, what kind of industry reflection is hidden behind the rise and fall of Mirror?

Origin: The Ambition of Reconstructing the Creator Economy (2020-2021)

As the earliest platform to explore the "ownership economy" in the Web3 wave, the birth of Mirror is inseparable from the two major narratives of the crypto world: NFT assetization and DAO governance experiments.

When its founder Denis Nazarov (former a16z partner) launched the product prototype at the end of 2020, he anchored a subversive proposition-liberating content creation from platform monopoly and allowing creators to directly control content ownership and revenue rights.

The initial functional design directly hits the pain points of traditional platforms:

1. Content NFTization: Each article can be cast as an NFT, the creator retains permanent copyright, and obtains a share through secondary market transactions;

2. Crowdfunding tools: support creators to initiate on-chain crowdfunding, supporters invest in ETH and obtain project tokens, forming a "creation-financing-revenue sharing" closed loop (typical case: Emily Segal's novel crowdfunding 408,000 yuan);

3. Decentralized storage: based on Arweave to achieve permanent content storage, avoiding the risk of platform deletion and modification;

4. Token economy experiment: allow the issuance of ERC-20 tokens to build a fan economy ecosystem.

These features quickly attracted crypto-native creators. At its peak in 2021, Mirror's monthly visits exceeded 10 million, ranking in the top 50 of the blockchain application traffic list, and was regarded as the "Web3 version of Medium".

The logic of its success lies in: directly mapping the value of content to on-chain assets, and reconstructing the distribution of interests among creators, investors, and communicators through token mechanisms.

Peak: DAO Toolkit and the Dream of "Web3 Media Empire" (2021-2022)

During the bull market in 2021, Mirror ushered in its highlight moment. With the outbreak of the DAO concept, the platform launched tools such as Splits (profit sharing) and TokenRace (community voting) in an attempt to become a "DAO operating system." A typical example is the basketball community The Krause House, which raised 1,000 ETH (about 2.8 million USD) through Mirror crowdfunding and used tokens to distribute governance rights.

At this time, Mirror's positioning has shifted from a content platform to Web3 infrastructure:

• Technical layer: Integrate ENS domain names, MetaMask wallets and other components to lower the user entry threshold;

• Ecological layer: Open APIs to attract developers to build third-party tools (such as article search engines Askmirror.xyz);

• Narrative layer: Claims to create a "roadshow platform for the value Internet" to connect creators, investors and communities.

During this period, Mirror’s average monthly visits remained stable at over 10 million. On-chain data showed that it had minted over 100,000 NFT content, and the total crowdfunding amount exceeded 5,000 ETH. Denis Nazarov even proposed the vision that “every DAO needs a Mirror homepage.”

Cracks: Strategic Swings and Product Shortcomings (2022-2023)

1. Lost functional positioning

Mirror repeatedly swings between "tool platform" and "media community":

• In August 2022, it suddenly removed the NFT and crowdfunding functions and turned to pure content publishing;

• In 2023, it restarted the "Subscribe to Mint" subscription NFT function, but did not solve the problem of traffic distribution for creators;

• Basic functions (such as data analysis and subscription systems) have long relied on third-party development, and official iterations have stagnated.

2. Regulatory pressure and compliance dilemma

The US SEC's stricter scrutiny of token issuance has forced Mirror to abandon its most attractive "crowdfunding-token" model. Some projects (such as The Krause House) have been investigated for suspected securities violations, causing a collapse in investor confidence.

3. User growth bottleneck

Compared with traditional platforms, Mirror has never been able to break through the encryption circle:

• High operation threshold: need to be familiar with wallet operation, Gas fee payment and other processes;

• Poor content quality: a large number of project soft articles and speculative content are flooded;

• Experience fragmentation: article reading, NFT transactions, and community interactions are scattered in different interfaces.

By the end of 2023, Mirror's monthly visits plummeted to less than 2 million, falling out of the top 200 blockchain applications.

Collapse: Acquisition, Transformation and Industry Reflection (2024-2025)

In May 2024, Paragraph announced the acquisition of Mirror, marking the end of its independent operation era. The transaction details show:

• Mirror's valuation has shrunk by 90% from its peak, and its parent company Reflective Technologies Inc. sold it at a low price on the grounds of "excessive technical debt and unclear business model";

• The core team turned to developing the social application Kiosk, focusing on "on-chain social + asset trading", but the product did not leave the Farcaster framework;

• The original content ecosystem was migrated to Paragraph, and a large number of creators left due to the decline in the share ratio.

If the previous strategic mistakes can still be attributed to the market environment, then the "on-chain suspension event" in the early morning of January 13, 2025 completely tore off Mirror's last fig leaf.

At 0:38 (GMT+8) on the same day, the platform forced all newly published articles to be stored on centralized servers without any announcement, and stopped uploading content to the chain.

Although the team argued that "Arweave storage costs are too high and user experience needs to be optimized", the on-chain browser data showed that in the next two months, only 3 new interaction records were added to the Mirror contract address, and all of them were modification operations of old articles.

This means that this platform, which once boasted of "permanent data sovereignty", has personally pressed the delete key on the most core battlefield of Web3 narrative - the immutability of content.

The community reaction was devastating:

• Creators collectively protested: Top crypto artist pplpleasr withdrew all his works and publicly mocked: "Mirror's server life may be shorter than my Wi-Fi router";

• A wave of data migration broke out: The number of creators entering competing products such as Paragraph and Lens Protocol surged by 400% in a single week, and some users even manually burned article hashes to the Bitcoin Ordinals protocol;

• On-chain evidence archiving: Anonymous developer @0xSisyphus captured Mirror server data and compared it with on-chain records, and found that at least 12% of historical articles had been tampered with (including deleting regulatory sensitive content).

The absurdity of this farce is that when the user asked "why not inform in advance", Mirror customer service actually quoted Article 4.7 of the User Agreement - "the platform has the right to unilaterally adjust the storage strategy."

In the early version of this agreement, the clause originally stated that "all content is permanently on-chain by default." A user dug up a video of Denis Nazarov's speech in 2021, in which he was holding up a slogan "Storing on-chain is a human right" - now this video is priced at 0.0001 ETH in the NFT market, marked "historical satire artwork."

Dissecting death: When "decentralization" becomes a growth tool

Mirror's collapse is no accident. Looking back at its development trajectory, the "pseudo-decentralized" gene was planted as early as 2022:

1. The "eye-catching trick" of selective chain-up

Despite the promotion of "full-chain storage", Mirror always holds the core data in its hands:

• User relationship map: data such as fan subscriptions and reading records have never been uploaded to the chain;

• Traffic distribution rules: The article recommendation algorithm has always been a black box system that is not open source;

• Revenue sharing logic: The platform's commission ratio adjustment does not require community voting, and is directly decided by the San Francisco headquarters.

This strategy of "centralizing key data and putting edge data on the chain" is essentially the same as the Web2 platform's operation of "trading API openness for regulatory compliance."

2. The "exploitative turn" of the economic model

The "Subscribe to Mint" function launched in 2023 exposed the underlying logic of Mirror:

• Creators: Need to pay 5% platform tax + Gas fee to issue subscription NFTs;

• Readers: Need to pledge tokens to obtain voting rights and affect the ranking of article recommendations;

• Platform: By controlling the rhythm of token release, it actually rebuilt the Web2 closed loop of "traffic purchase - algorithm manipulation - commission harvesting".

This design was criticized by crypto economist Tina Heidenberg: "It replicates YouTube's advertising revenue sharing system with blockchain technology, but is less efficient and less transparent."

3. "Suicidal Compromise" of Infrastructure

In pursuit of user growth, Mirror has lowered its technical standards many times:

• In 2023, it will cancel the mandatory ENS domain name binding and allow email registration (leading to a surge in witch attacks);

• Introducing the "off-chain signature" solution in 2024, which essentially entrusts the private key to the platform server;

• In 2025, it will completely abandon Arweave and use AWS Singapore nodes to store data.

When the team gave in layer by layer on the technology stack, Mirror was no longer the holy grail of the Web3 world, but became an AWS subdirectory with a skull flag.

Epilogue: Written on the night when the "Berlin Wall" of Web3 fell

In March 2025, when the last batch of Mirror creators issued a "#RIPMirror" eulogy on the X platform, people finally realized that the Web3 revolution had never promised a gentle land, and it needed a thorough technical purge - killing all the "fake prophets" who dared not put the server in a cage.

As Bitcoin core developer Jameson Lopp wrote in his eulogy: "Mirror's tombstone should be engraved with the oath of all Web3 entrepreneurs: If you still want to control the life and death of data, please return to Silicon Valley with a clear conscience and do not use "decentralization" to blaspheme the church of crypto believers.