From the pioneer of the Web3 content revolution to the "decentralized bubble" sample, a review of the rise and fall of Mirror in one article

Author: Lawrence, Mars Finance

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

During the Web3 craze, 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 it was even more shockingly lower than 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 between reality. From the spark of innovation to the bursting of bubbles, what kind of industry reflection is hidden behind Mirror's rise and fall?

Origin: Reconstructing the creator's economy ambition (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.

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 the platform monopoly, allowing creators to directly grasp the ownership and income rights of content.

Initial functional design directly hits the pain points of traditional platforms:

1. ​Content NFT: Each article can be minted as NFT, the creator retains permanent copyright, and obtains share through secondary market transactions;
2. ​Crowdfunding tools: Support creators to initiate on-chain crowdfunding, and supporters invest with ETH and obtain project tokens to form a closed loop of "creation-financing-revenue sharing" (typical case: Emily Segal novel crowdfunding of 408,000 yuan);
3. ​Decentralized storage: implement permanent content storage based on Arweave to avoid the risk of platform deletion and modification;
4. ​Token Economic Experiment: Allow ERC-20 tokens to build a fan economic ecosystem.

These functions quickly attracted 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 was regarded as the "Web3 version of Medium".

The logic of 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 the "Web3 Media Empire" Dream (2021-2022)​

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

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

• ​Technical layer: Integrate ENS domain names, MetaMask wallet and other components to lower the threshold for user entry;
• ​Eco-layer: Open APIs attract developers to build third-party tools (such as article search engine Askmirror.xyz);
• ​Narration: declares to build a "roadshow platform for value Internet" to connect creators, investors and communities.

During 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 swings repeatedly between the "tool platform" and the "media community":

• In August 2022, NFT and crowdfunding functions were suddenly removed from the shelves and turned to pure content release;
• 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, subscription systems) have long relied on third-party development, and official iterations have stagnated.

2. Regulatory pressure and compliance dilemma

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) 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 operating threshold: you need to be familiar with wallet operation, 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 split: article reading, NFT trading, and community interaction are scattered on different interfaces.

By 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. Transaction details show:

• Mirror's valuation shrank by 90% from its peak, and its 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 has not left the Farcaster framework;
• The original content ecosystem has moved to Paragraph, and a large number of creators have left due to the decline in share share.

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 that day (GMT+8), the platform forced all newly published articles to be stored on a centralized server without publishing any announcements, and the content will be stopped 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 content that is not tampered with.

The community reaction was tragic:

• Creators collectively protested : the head crypto artist pplpleasr withdrew all his works and publicly mocked: "Mirror's server life may be shorter than my Wi-Fi router."
• The data migration wave exploded : the number of creators entering competitors such as Paragraph and Lens Protocol surged by 400% in a single week, and some users even manually burned article hashs to the Bitcoin Ordinals protocol;
• On-chain evidence archive: Anonymous developer @0xSisyphus crawled Mirror server data to compare 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: When users questioned "why don't inform them 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 an earlier version of this agreement, the clause originally stated that "all content is permanently linked by default." A user found a video of Denis Nazarov's speech in 2021. 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".

Anatomical death: When "decentralization" becomes a tool for growth

Mirror's collapse is by no means accidental. Looking back at its development trajectory, the "pseudo-decentralization" gene was laid as early as 2022:

1. "Disguise Method" for Selective Linking​

Despite promoting "full-chain storage", Mirror always holds core data in his hands:

• User relationship map: Fan subscriptions, reading records and other data have never been posted on the link;
• Traffic allocation rules : The article recommendation algorithm is always an unopen source black box system;
• Revenue sharing logic : The adjustment of the platform commission ratio does not require community voting, and it is directly decided by the San Francisco headquarters.
• This strategy of "centralization of key data and edge data linking" is essentially the same as the Web2 platform's "using API openness to exchange regulatory compliance" operations.

2. The “Exploitable Turn” of Economic Model​

The "Subscribe to Mint" function launched in 2023 exposes Mirror's underlying logic:

• Creator : You need to pay 5% platform tax + Gas fee to issue subscription NFTs;
• Reader: You need to pledge tokens to obtain voting rights, which will affect the ranking of article recommendations;
• Platform : By controlling the rhythm of token release, the Web2 closed loop of "traffic purchasing-algorithm manipulation-commission harvesting" has been rebuilt.

This design was criticized by crypto economist Tina Heidenberg: "Blockchain technology replicated 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 its technical standards:

• Forced ENS domain name binding will be cancelled in 2023 and mailbox registration will be allowed (resulting in a surge in witch attacks);
• In 2024, the "off-chain signature" solution will be introduced, which will essentially host the private key to the platform server;
• In 2025, Arweave will be completely deprecated and AWS Singapore nodes will be used 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 the skeleton flag hanging.​

**​Epilogue: The night of the collapse of the "Berlin Wall" written on

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 "counterfeit prophets" who dared not put servers in cages.

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 manipulate the power of life and death in data, please return to Silicon Valley openly and not use 'decentralization' to blasphemy of encrypted believers.