Author: Nanzhi, Odaily Star Daily

On May 2nd, Web3 content publishing platform Mirror announced its acquisition by Paragraph. The Mirror team will continue to operate independently and will shift its focus to developing Kiosk, a Web3 social application based on Farcaster. Mirror's parent company, Reflective Technologies Inc., revealed that it has raised $10 million from Electric Capital, with additional support from a16z crypto, Union Square Ventures, and Variant.

Launched in 2021, Mirror quickly became an important creative platform and tool in the Web3 field, but due to various factors such as positioning, development direction, and products, its market share rapidly declined. The primary official content and creator platform is now Medium, and Paragraph, as Mirror's main competitor in the Web3 creator field, has successfully completed its acquisition. Odaily Star Daily will interpret the past and present of Mirror and its latest product Kiosk in this article.

The Past and Present of Mirror

Mirror was founded by Denis Nazarov, a former partner at a16z crypto. At the end of 2020, Mirror released its initial product prototype, storing content on Arweave. Most people understand it as a Web3 version of Medium or Substack, a "decentralized" content publishing platform. However, from a technical and imaginative perspective, this was not outstanding in the crowded field of content creation platforms. What innovative path did Mirror want to take to stand out?

At that time, Mirror's answer was to focus on B2B, as a crowdfunding and media tool for DAOs. Mirror's self-description at the time was: "The essential web3 toolkit for sharing and funding anything. From writing about your latest idea, to building a home for the next big DAO."

In addition to content creation, what other features did Mirror offer?

First, Mirror supported the sale of NFTs for works, with users who purchased these NFTs rewarding the creators (Mirror takes a 2.5% cut). It also supported direct crowdfunding for projects and the ability to issue tokens.

In short, Mirror hoped that all projects in need of crowdfunding would be published on its platform, raise funds, and provide updates on their direction and progress through Mirror. Some well-known examples include The Krause House (crowdfunding 1000 ETH, already soft rug), the movie Ethereum: The Infinite Garden (crowdfunding 1035 ETH), and the wallet Balance Wallet (crowdfunding 883 ETH).

Pure or Feature-Poor

It is worth noting that in the early stages of the product, Mirror lacked common features found on content platforms, such as subscriptions, reading statistics, and portals. Creators could not directly analyze and promote their work, and readers or users found it difficult to track directly. Creators needed to use other platforms for promotion, while subscription, analysis, and other features required third-party tools.

The Mirror team believed that these were all application-layer demands that should be handled by the community, with the team focusing solely on building the underlying services. Since the data was published on Arweave without any restrictions, all developers and users could access the data, so the development of "advanced" ecosystem products and features was left to the community.

However, delegating the development of these features to the community did not mean that the Mirror team was hands-off. The Mirror team would communicate with and invite teams that developed excellent Mirror add-on products to co-build the Mirror DAO ecosystem.

Swinging Roadmap

While Mirror achieved impressive data and accomplishments in the B2B field mentioned above, in August 2022, Mirror announced the removal of all NFT and crowdfunding-related features, returning to the purely B2C crowded field. However, the following year, it launched the Subscribe to Mint feature. The reasons behind these puzzling operations may be related to the team being based in the United States and influenced by regulatory pressure, but the truth is unknown.

Shifting to Kiosk

After Paragraph's acquisition of Mirror, Paragraph will take over the management of Mirror's products, design systems, and brand. The Mirror team will shift its focus to developing Kiosk, a Web3 social application based on Farcaster.

Currently, Mirror has not disclosed project details. Odaily has summarized key information about Kiosk: "Kiosk is a new Farcaster client that combines social and on-chain. It allows users to socialize on-chain while conducting on-chain transactions. Through Kiosk, users can easily turn images into NFTs, discover and purchase assets collected by friends, and gather like-minded collectors and community members in token-driven channels or group chats.

Kiosk aims to break down the barriers between on-chain socializing and on-chain transactions, enabling users to seamlessly trade and interact on social media, thereby promoting the development of decentralized social media."

Based on the above content, it can be seen that the product aims to empower users to issue and trade assets on social media, with a shift in focus to the community. Currently, users can enter the Waitlist for NFTs by minting official announcement articles in Mirror.

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