Author: Lawrence, Mars Finance
From peak to collapse: Mirror’s Web3 dream and collapse
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 website traffic analysis platform SimilarWeb, 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. Compared with its peak period, the decline is even more alarming - in the blockchain industry website rankings, Mirror has fallen to 2183rd place.
Behind all these changes lies the shattering 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 one of the earliest platforms to explore the "ownership economy" in the Web3 wave, the birth of Mirror is closely related to two major narratives in 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 - to liberate content creation from platform monopoly and allow creators to directly control content ownership and profit rights.
Initial functional design directly hits the pain points of traditional platforms:
- Content NFTization: Each article can be minted as an NFT, the creator retains permanent copyright and obtains a share through secondary market transactions;
- Crowdfunding tools: Support creators to initiate on-chain crowdfunding, and supporters invest in ETH and obtain project tokens, forming a closed loop of "creation-financing-revenue sharing" (typical case: Emily Segal's novel crowdfunding of 408,000 yuan);
- Decentralized storage: Permanent storage of content based on Arweave to avoid the risk of platform deletion and modification;
- 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 behind its success lies in: Directly mapping the value of content into on-chain assets, and reconstructing the distribution of interests among creators, investors, and communicators through a token mechanism.
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 case is that the basketball community The Krause House raised 1,000 ETH (about 2.8 million US dollars) through Mirror and used tokens to distribute governance rights.
At this point, Mirror’s positioning has shifted from a content platform to Web3 infrastructure:
- Technical layer: Integrate ENS domain name, MetaMask wallet and other components to lower the user entry threshold;
- Ecosystem layer: Open APIs to attract developers to build third-party tools (such as article search engine 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 oscillates between "tool platform" and "media community":
- In August 2022, the NFT and crowdfunding functions were suddenly removed from the shelves, and the platform switched to pure content publishing;
- In 2023, the “Subscribe to Mint” subscription-based NFT function was restarted, but the problem of creators’ traffic distribution was not solved;
- 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 tightening of the US SEC’s 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 operational threshold: You need to be familiar with wallet operation, gas fee payment and other processes;
- Content quality varies : a large number of soft articles and speculative content are flooded;
- Fragmented experience: article reading, NFT transactions, and community interactions are scattered across 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: Acquisitions, transformation and industry rethinking (2024-2025)
In May 2024, Paragraph announced the acquisition of Mirror, marking the end of its independent operation. 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 due to "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 deviate from the Farcaster framework;
- The original content ecosystem migrated to Paragraph, and a large number of creators left due to the decline in profit sharing ratios.
If the previous strategic mistakes could still be attributed to the market environment, then the "on-chain interruption incident" 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, without any announcement, the platform forced all newly published articles to be stored on the centralized server and stopped uploading the content to the chain.
Although the team argued that "Arweave storage costs are too high and the user experience needs to be optimized", on-chain browser data showed that: in the following two months, the Mirror contract address only added 3 new interaction records, and all of them were modifications to old articles.
This means that this platform, which once boasted of "permanent data sovereignty", has 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 home Wi-Fi router";
- Data migration boom : Paragraph, Lens Protocol and other competing products saw a 400% surge in the number of creators in a single week, with some users even manually burning article hashes to the Bitcoin Ordinals protocol;
- On-chain evidence archive: 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 lies in the fact that when the user questioned "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 policy".
In an earlier version of the agreement, the clause originally stated that "all content is permanently stored on the chain by default." A user found a video of Denis Nazarov's speech in 2021, in which he was holding up a sign that read "Storing on-chain is a human right" - now the video is priced at 0.0001 ETH in the NFT market, labeled "historical satire artwork."
Autopsy of Death: When “Decentralization” Becomes a Growth Tool
The collapse of Mirror is no accident. Looking back at its development trajectory, the "pseudo-decentralization" gene was planted as early as 2022:
1. The “smoke screen” of selective on-chaining
Despite the promotion of "full-chain storage", Mirror always holds the core data in its hands:
- User relationship graph: fan subscriptions, reading records and other data are never uploaded to the chain;
- Traffic distribution rules : The article recommendation algorithm is always 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 decided directly 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” feature launched in 2023 exposed the underlying logic of Mirror:
- Creators : need to pay 5% platform tax + gas fee to issue subscription NFT;
- Readers: need to stake tokens to obtain voting rights and influence the ranking of article recommendations;
- Platform : By controlling the pace of token release, it actually reconstructs the Web2 closed loop of "traffic purchase-algorithm manipulation-commission harvesting".
This design was criticized by crypto economist Tina Heidenberg: "It uses blockchain technology to replicate YouTube's advertising revenue sharing system, but it is less efficient and less transparent."
3. Infrastructure suicidal compromise
In pursuit of user growth, Mirror has lowered its technical standards several times:
- In 2023, mandatory ENS domain name binding will be cancelled and email registration will be allowed (leading to a surge in Sybil attacks);
- In 2024, the “off-chain signature” solution was introduced, which essentially entrusted the private key to the platform server;
- In 2025, Arweave will be completely abandoned and AWS Singapore nodes will be used to store data.
As the team made concessions on the technology stack, Mirror was no longer the holy grail of the Web3 world, but became an AWS subdirectory with a skull and crossbones.
Epilogue: Written on the night when the “Berlin Wall” fell in Web3
In March 2025, when the last batch of Mirror creators issued a eulogy of "#RIPMirror" on the X platform, people finally realized that the Web3 revolution never promised a gentle land, and it needed a thorough technical purge - killing all the "counterfeit 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 an open mind, and don’t use ‘decentralization’ to blaspheme the church of crypto believers.
