Written by: Lawrence

From the peak to collapse: Mirror's Web3 Dreams and Destruction

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

According to data from similarWeb, the 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 decline compared to its peak period. In the blockchain industry website rankings, Mirror has fallen to 2183.

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

Origin: Ambition to Reconstruct the Creator Economy (2020-2021)

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

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

Initial functional design hits the pain points of traditional platforms:

Content NFTization: Each article can be minted as NFT, the creator retains permanent copyright, and obtains share through secondary market transactions;

Crowdfunding tools: Support creators to initiate on-chain crowdfunding, supporters invest with ETH and obtain project tokens, forming a closed loop of "creation - financing - income sharing" (typical case: Emily Segal novel crowdfunding of 408,000 yuan);

Decentralized storage: implement permanent content storage 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 economic ecosystem.

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

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

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

Mirror ushered in a highlight moment during the 2021 bull market. With the explosion of the DAO concept, the platform launched tools such as Splits (revenue sharing), TokenRace (community voting), and attempted to become the "DAO operating system". Typical cases are for the basketball community The Krause House crowdfunded 1,000 ETH (approximately $2.8 million) through Mirror and used tokens to achieve governance rights distribution.

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 threshold for user entry;

Eco-layer: Open APIs to attract developers to build third-party tools (such as the article search engine Askmirror.xyz);

Narration layer: declares that it will build a "roadshow platform for value Internet" to connect creators, investors and communities.

At this stage, Mirror's average monthly visits remained stable at more than 10 million. On-chain data showed that it had accumulated more than 100,000 NFT content, and the total crowdfunding volume exceeded 5,000 ETH. Denis Nazarov even proposed the vision of "every DAO needs a Mirror homepage."

Cracks: Strategic Swing and Product Failure (2022-2023)1. Lost functional positioning

Mirror repeatedly swayed between the "tool platform" and the "media community":

In August 2022, NFT and crowdfunding functions suddenly removed from the shelves and turned to pure content release;

The subscribe to Mint function was restarted in 2023, but the problem of creators' traffic distribution was not solved;

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

2. Regulatory pressure and compliance dilemma

The US SEC has become more scrutinized on token issuance, forcing Mirror to abandon the most attractive "crowdfunding-token" model. Some projects (such as The Krause House) were investigated for suspected securities violations, causing investor confidence to collapse.

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 operations, Gas fee payment and other processes;

Content quality is uneven: a large number of project parties are filled with soft articles and speculative content;

Experience separation: article reading, NFT trading, and community interaction are scattered on different interfaces.

At the end of 2023, Mirror's monthly visits plummeted to 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 era of independent operations. Trading details show:

Mirror Valuation is higher than the peak periodThe decline was 90%, and the parent company Reflective Technologies Inc. sold at a low price on the grounds of "excessive technical debt and vague business model";

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

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

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

At 0:38 on the same day (GMT+8), the platform will force all newly published articles to be stored on the centralized server without publishing any announcements and stop the content from being linked.

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

This means that this platform, which once claimed to be "permanent sovereignty of data", pressed the delete key with his own hands on the most core battlefield of Web3 narrative - the immutability of content.

The community response was tragic:

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";

Data migration wave exploded: Paragraph, Lens Protocol and other competitors surged 400% in a single week, and some users even manually burned article hash to the Bitcoin Ordinals protocol;

On-chain evidence archive: Anonymous developer @0xSisyphus crawled Mirror server data compared to on-chain records and found that at least 12% of historical articles have been tampered with (including deleting regulatory sensitive content).

The absurdity of this farce lies in that when the user asked "why not informed 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."

而这份协议的早期版本中，该条款原本写着「所有内容默认永久上链」。 A user found a 2021 Denis Nazarov speech video. In the picture, he was holding up the slogan "Storing on-chain is a human right" - now this video is priced at 0.0001 ETH in the NFT market, marked as "historical satirical artwork".

解剖死亡：当「去中心化」沦为增长工具

Mirror 的崩溃绝非偶然。 Looking back at its development trajectory, the "pseudo-decentralization" gene has been laid as early as 2022:

1. "Disguise" for selective linking

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

User relationship map: Fan subscriptions, reading records and other data have never been chained;

Train allocation rules: Article recommendation algorithms are always unopen source black box systems;

收益分成逻辑：平台抽成比例调整无需社区投票，由旧金山总部直接决策。

这种「关键数据中心化，边缘数据上链」的策略，本质上与 Web2 平台「用 API 开放度换监管合规」的操作如出一辙。

2. "Exploitable Turn" of the Economic Model

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

Creator: 5% platform tax + Gas fee is required to issue subscription NFT;

Reader: You need to pledge tokens to obtain voting rights, which will affect the article recommendation ranking;

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

This design was criticized by crypto economist Tina Heidenberg: "Blockchain technology has been used to replicate YouTube's advertising accounting system, but it is less efficient and more opaque."

3. "Suicide Compromise" in infrastructure

In order to pursue user growth, Mirror has repeatedly lowered technical standards:

In 2023, mandatory ENS domain name binding was cancelled, allowing mailbox registration (which led to a surge in witch attacks);

In 2024, the "off-chain signature" solution was introduced, which essentially hosted the private key to the platform server;

In 2025, Arweave was completely deprecated and used AWS Singapore nodes to store data.

When the team gave in layers on the technology stack, Mirror was no longer the holy grail of the Web3 world, but became an AWS subdirectory with the skeleton flag hanging.

Epilogue: Written on the night of the collapse of the "Berlin Wall" in Web3

In March 2025, when the last group of Mirror creators issued the eulogy of "#RIPMirror" on the X platform, people finally realized that the Web3 revolution never promised a land of gentleness, and it needed a thorough technical clearance - killing all the "counterfeit prophets" who dared not put their servers in cages.

As Bitcoin core developer Jameson Lopp wrote in his eulogy, "Mirror's tombstone should be engraved with all the oaths of Web3 entrepreneurs: If you still want to manipulate the power of life and death in data, please return to Silicon Valley openly and not use "decentralization" to blaspheme the church of encrypted believers.