The Rise and Fall of Mirror: From Pioneer of the Web3 Content Revolution to a Sample of the "Decentralized Bubble"

Author: Lawrence, Mars Finance

From Peak to Collapse: The Dream and Disillusionment of Mirror in Web3

In the frenzy of Web3, Mirror was once seen as the future of content creation. However, over time, this pioneering platform that led the decentralized revolution is rapidly sliding into silence.

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

Behind all these changes lies the collision between the disillusionment of the decentralized dream and the harsh reality. From the spark of innovation to the burst of the bubble, what industry reflections are hidden behind Mirror's rise and fall?

Origins: The Ambition to Restructure the Creator Economy (2020-2021)

As one of the earliest platforms exploring the "ownership economy" in the Web3 wave, Mirror's birth is closely tied to two major narratives in the crypto world: NFT assetization and DAO governance experiments.

Its founder, Denis Nazarov (former a16z partner), launched the product prototype at the end of 2020, anchoring a disruptive proposition—to liberate content creation from platform monopolies, allowing creators to directly control content ownership and revenue rights.

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

1. Content NFTization: Each article can be minted as an NFT, allowing creators to retain permanent copyright and earn revenue through secondary market transactions;
2. Crowdfunding Tools: Supporting creators to initiate on-chain crowdfunding, where supporters invest in ETH and receive project tokens, forming a "creation-financing-revenue sharing" closed loop (typical case: Emily Segal's novel crowdfunding raised 408,000 yuan);
3. Decentralized Storage: Achieving permanent content storage based on Arweave, avoiding the risk of platform deletion or modification;
4. Token Economic Experiments: Allowing the issuance of ERC-20 tokens to build a fan economy ecosystem.

These features quickly attracted crypto-native creators, and during its peak in 2021, Mirror's monthly visits exceeded ten million, ranking among the top 50 blockchain applications, regarded as the "Web3 version of Medium."

Its success logic lies in: directly mapping content value to on-chain assets and reconstructing the interest distribution among creators, investors, and disseminators through a token mechanism.

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

During the bull market in 2021, Mirror reached its high point. With the explosion of the DAO concept, the platform launched tools like Splits (revenue sharing) and TokenRace (community voting), attempting to become the "DAO operating system." A typical case is the basketball community The Krause House, which raised 1000 ETH (approximately 2.8 million USD) through Mirror and used tokens for governance rights distribution.

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

• Technical Layer: Integrating components like ENS domains and MetaMask wallets to lower the entry barrier for users;
• Ecosystem Layer: Opening APIs to attract developers to build third-party tools (e.g., article search engine Askmirror.xyz);
• Narrative Layer: Claiming to create a "roadshow platform for the value internet," connecting creators, investors, and communities.

During this phase, Mirror's average monthly visits stabilized above ten million, with on-chain data showing it had minted over 100,000 NFT contents, and the total amount raised through crowdfunding exceeded 5000 ETH. Denis Nazarov even proposed the vision that "every DAO needs a Mirror homepage."

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

1. Functional Positioning Confusion

Mirror repeatedly wavered between being a "tool platform" and a "media community":

• In August 2022, it suddenly removed NFT and crowdfunding features, shifting to pure content publishing;
• In 2023, it restarted the "Subscribe to Mint" subscription NFT feature but did not solve the creator traffic distribution problem;
• Basic functions (such as data analysis and subscription systems) have long relied on third-party development, with official iterations stagnating.

2. Regulatory Pressure and Compliance Dilemmas

The tightening scrutiny of token issuance by the U.S. SEC forced Mirror to abandon its most attractive "crowdfunding-token" model. Some projects (like The Krause House) were investigated for suspected securities violations, leading to a collapse in investor confidence.

3. User Growth Bottleneck

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

• High Operational Threshold: Users need to be familiar with wallet operations, Gas fee payments, and other processes;
• Variable Content Quality: A large number of projects are filled with promotional articles and speculative content;
• Fragmented Experience: Article reading, NFT trading, and community interaction are scattered across different interfaces.

By the end of 2023, Mirror's monthly visits plummeted below 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. Transaction details revealed:

• Mirror's valuation had shrunk by 90% compared to its peak, with the parent company Reflective Technologies Inc. selling at a low price due to "excessive technical debt and unclear business model";
• The core team shifted to developing the social application Kiosk, focusing on "on-chain social + asset trading," but the product did not break away from the Farcaster framework;
• The original content ecosystem migrated to Paragraph, with many creators leaving due to declining revenue sharing ratios.

If the previous strategic missteps could still be attributed to market conditions, then the "on-chain interruption incident" in the early morning of January 13, 2025, completely tore apart Mirror's last fig leaf.

At 0:38 AM (GMT+8) that day, the platform, without any announcement, forced all newly published articles to be stored on centralized servers, halting content on-chain.

Although the team argued that "Arweave storage costs were too high and needed to optimize user experience," on-chain browser data showed that in the following two months, Mirror's contract address recorded only 3 new interactions, all of which were modifications of old articles.

This meant that this platform, which once claimed "data permanent sovereignty," had pressed the delete button on the most core battlefield of Web3 narratives—content immutability.

The community's reaction was devastating:

• Creators' Collective Protest: Leading crypto artist pplpleasr withdrew all works and publicly mocked, "Mirror's server lifespan might be shorter than my home Wi-Fi router";
• Data Migration Surge: Competing products like Paragraph and Lens Protocol saw a 400% increase in creators joining in a single week, with some users even manually burning article hashes to the Bitcoin Ordinals protocol;
• On-chain Evidence Archiving: Anonymous developer @0xSisyphus captured Mirror server data to compare with on-chain records, finding that at least 12% of historical articles had been altered (including the deletion of regulatory sensitive content).

The absurdity of this farce lies in the fact that when users questioned "why not inform us in advance," Mirror's customer service actually cited Article 4.7 of the "User Agreement"—"the platform has the right to unilaterally adjust storage policies."

In the early version of this agreement, this clause originally stated, "All content is assumed to be permanently on-chain." Some users dug up a 2021 speech video of Denis Nazarov, where he was holding a sign that read "Storing on-chain is a human right"—now this video is listed at 0.0001 ETH in the NFT market, marked as "historical ironic artwork."

Dissecting Death: When "Decentralization" Becomes a Growth Tool

The collapse of Mirror is by no means accidental. Looking back at its development trajectory, the "pseudo-decentralization" gene was already planted in 2022:

1. The "Smoke and Mirrors" of Selective On-Chain Storage

Despite promoting "full on-chain storage," Mirror has always held core data in its hands:

• User Relationship Graph: Data such as fan subscriptions and reading records have never been on-chain;
• Traffic Distribution Rules: The article recommendation algorithm has always been a non-open-source black box system;
• Revenue Sharing Logic: The platform's commission rate adjustments do not require community voting and are directly decided by the headquarters in San Francisco.
• This strategy of "centralizing key data while putting peripheral data on-chain" is essentially akin to Web2 platforms "trading API openness for regulatory compliance."

2. The "Exploitive Turn" of the Economic Model

The "Subscribe to Mint" feature launched in 2023 exposed Mirror's underlying logic:

• Creators: Must pay a 5% platform tax + Gas fees to issue subscription NFTs;
• Readers: Must stake tokens to gain voting rights, affecting article recommendation rankings;
• Platform: By controlling the token release rhythm, it effectively rebuilt the "traffic purchase-algorithm manipulation-revenue harvesting" Web2 closed loop.

This design was harshly criticized by crypto economist Tina Heidenberg: "It replicated YouTube's ad revenue sharing system using blockchain technology, but with lower efficiency and less transparency."

3. The "Suicidal Compromise" of Infrastructure

In pursuit of user growth, Mirror repeatedly lowered technical standards:

• In 2023, it canceled mandatory ENS domain binding, allowing email registration (leading to a surge in witch attacks);
• In 2024, it introduced an "off-chain signature" scheme, effectively entrusting private keys to the platform's servers;
• In 2025, it completely abandoned Arweave, opting for AWS Singapore nodes to store data.

As the team retreated layer by layer in the tech stack, Mirror was no longer the holy grail of the Web3 world but had devolved into an AWS subdirectory flying a skull flag.

Epilogue: Written on the Night of the "Berlin Wall" of Web3's Collapse

In March 2025, as the last batch of Mirror creators sent out "#RIPMirror" tributes on the X platform, people finally realized: the Web3 revolution never promised a gentle refuge; it requires a thorough technical purge—killing all "imposter prophets" who dare not lock their servers in a cage.

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