Frame your Mirror – Mirror Development
]]>Starting today, you can cast any Mirror URL on Farcaster to automatically turn it into a frame, so your readers can:
2023 in Review: What’s Writing Good For Anyway? – Mirror Development
]]>A lot of writing about GPTs and LLMs in 2023 asked whether writing itself might become obsolete. In the same year, media companies cut 20,342 jobs. 2023 was a year where broadcast feed social networks like Lens, Warpcast, and Bluesky dented X/Twitter’s dominance. Yet despite having more platforms than ever to broadcast one's ideas, more and more people sought smaller, niche communities online.
Reflections on Content Discovery: Mirror's Evolving Homepage – Mirror Development
]]>More writing, music, podcasts, and art is released into the world every day — faster than ever before. How do you keep up with all this new content? How do you separate good ideas from flashes in the pan? How can you keep up with writers with alpha or the artists you admire?
Introducing Writing NFTs 2.0 – Mirror Development
]]>Today we’re excited to announce some exciting improvements to Writing NFTs, reinforcing Mirror as the best place to post, mint and collect writing in web3.
Introducing Collectable Embeds – Mirror Development
]]>Today, Mirror is excited to introduce Collectable Embeds. Creators can now embed NFTs from across Ethereum into their Mirror posts, letting readers collect inline without leaving the post.
]]>Today, Mirror is excited to launch Subscribe to Mint, a new way for creators to transform their collectors into an engaged web3 community.
]]>Since our launch, new communities that have coalesced on Mirror have redefined what we can accomplish together. Mirror has been fortunate to support ambitious crowdfunding campaigns like The Ethereum Film. Krause House bought a professional basketball team and is working toward buying an NBA team. Blvkhhvnd launched the first decentralized e-sports team and just won a world championship.
]]>Today, Mirror is excited to announce the launch of web3 subscriptions. This new feature allows readers to subscribe to any Mirror publication with their wallets and receive email notifications when new content is posted. For creators, web3 subscriptions open the door to building a wallet-based community that can be used across web3.
]]>Before Ethereum was code, it was a piece of writing. A year prior to Ethereum’s launch in 2015, Vitalik Buterin published a whitepaper that laid out his vision for the project. Like Satoshi before him, Vitalik’s whitepaper served as a call to action that inspired a group of believers to help bring his ideas to fruition. This whitepaper has become an invaluable artifact — a foundational text with historical significance.
]]>All of Mirror’s posts are available to access on Arweave, an on-chain decentralized storage layer that makes it so that your posts exist forever (even if Mirror does not)!
Introducing Editions v2 – Mirror Development
]]>This week, Mirror launches v2 of Editions as part of its publishing tools.
]]>With our recent release of Plugins, we also debuted the ability for creators to deploy their own ERC20 tokens in seconds on Mirror. And with not just any contract—this is the most finely tuned and efficient way to mint an ERC20 token around. To get started simply connect your wallet and enable the Tokens plugin.
]]>Mirror first emerged a year ago with tools enabling anyone to connect their wallet and instantly begin publishing on web3. The power unlocked by telling stories with blocks for creating media and economic content quickly became clear.
New Year, New Mirror: Reflecting on Mirror's First Year – Mirror Development
]]>It’s January 1st, 2021, about one year ago. The price of Ethereum is hovering just below $1,000, the world has never heard of NFTs, and Mirror is barely two weeks old. As a web3 project, it goes without saying our bets were on a web3 future, and there was no better time than December 2020 to rally around that optimism. The web3 community (which primarily congregated on Twitter) was reaching a fever pitch, in which there brewed a contagious aura of camaraderie, mutual support and experimentation.
]]>To say Mirror has been busy would be an understatement. A few weeks ago, all publishing, economic, and governance tools were opened to everyone. The Mirror DAO Pre-Season began and the team introduced new features like Token Race. The importance of a great home for all of these tools became very clear.
]]>Connect your wallet and start building a web3 project in seconds.
]]>Last December, Mirror launched its first product: a decentralized publishing protocol. Over the past year, we’ve also launched economic blocks for crowdfunding, auctions, NFT editions, and splits—as well as a governance product. Mirror has evolved from a tool for writers to a full-stack web3 creative suite for communities and DAOs.
]]>$WRITE Race is how users onboard to Mirror. Everyone who verifies their identity on the platform is a candidate for $WRITE race and can be voted for by anyone in the community. Voting is about participation, support, and impact, and the kinds of creators you’d like to see on Mirror. We reward participation by increasing your voting power by 10 each week you use your votes. But as the number of rounds and winners has increased, the impact of new voters has gone down.
]]>Mirror is working to open its creative and economic suite to the public, beginning with crowdfunds.
]]>$WRITE RACE has been very popular. Over the past few months, we've spoken with many projects that want to use a similar tool for their communities. We kept hearing this again and again, so we decided to build a standalone tool that anyone on Mirror could use. Today we'd like to introduce: Token Race.
]]>Open data in Web3 means we get to play with a large variety of interfaces for displaying information. While this means there is a lot of flexibility, it does introduce an extra step in the groundwork requirements for creating any kind of live discovery feed. We’ve decided to build a V1 feed into our Discord server for all Mirror events from our smart contracts, which can be further leveraged for our web interface in the future.
]]>The $WRITE Race Oracle is a contract that enables creators to make Sybil-resistant, fair-launch NFTs. Imagine if Loot, for example, could only have been minted once per person.
]]>The new editor allows you to seamlessly weave together multimedia content and economic participation into a cohesive narrative. Create a story that’s collectible. Raise funds to make your dream project a reality. Build a community around your writing.
]]>Editions are a way for creators to mint a limited supply of identical NFTs at a fixed price. If a 1/1 NFT is a Picasso at Sotheby's, Editions are like the thousands of first-edition holographic Charizards released. As a stupidly obvious sidenote, a cool thing about NFTs is that they’ll never get scuffed, scratched or bent :)
]]>We’ve always said Mirror is a sum of its community. What is Mirror = Who’s on Mirror. Beyond its crypto foundation, we’ve continued to implement features that reinforce a decentralized, collaborative effort. $WRITE RACE gives community members the power to influence how the platform grows. Splits allow creators to route value from their work to other creators, suggesting no idea is an island. While Splits cited multiple voices as responsible for a single work, those citations came from a single individual. One publication, one author.
]]>Last week, we announced Splits, a new feature on Mirror that allows you to continuously route ETH to an unlimited number of Ethereum addresses, according to a set of percentage allocations. The feature took off in novel ways across the Mirror community, already demonstrating exciting signs of early product-market fit.
]]>One of the earliest provocations at Mirror went a little like this: what if you had a great idea, and when telling the story introducing it to the world you could also enable the reader to participate in making that story come to life. What if that happened directly within the narrative as part of the story?
]]>Mirror recently introduced splits, a native feature that lets you route funds continuously to an unlimited number of Ethereum addresses, according to a set of percentage allocations.
]]>Mirror introduces splits, a native feature that lets you route funds continuously to an unlimited number of Ethereum addresses, according to a set of percentage allocations.
]]>Today we're excited to officially introduce a new feature to the writers of Mirror: You can now embed reserve auctions for zNFTs into any entry!
]]>Writing is at the center of Mirror. The editor is where ideas begin, and when ready, made public. But Mirror is not only a tool for writing. It also proposes new ways to fund, sustain, and grow the practices of writers. Not only are these big ideas, it’s also the early days in Mirror’s story.
]]>This week, Mirror begins an ongoing experiment in growth—granting our community the power to determine the platform's new members.
]]>We’re proud to have released a beta block to crowdfund writing on Mirror. Our first two experiments were a total success. John Palmer raised 10 ETH for his essay Scissor Labels, which has since be published. Just last week Cooper raised 2 ETH for Net Value Capture Equation, which will be published imminently. The next step is to unlock this for all Mirror writers; all in time!
]]>Mirror now supports embedding NFTs from several of the big platforms, including Zora, Foundation, Rarible, and SuperRare. In addition to images and videos there is also support for audio and text. Our plan is to progressively introduce greater coverage for metadata, such as display names for creators and owners, along with a few other surprises. You can see the updated NFT embeds in action on Jesse's entry and Cooper's entry on NFTs.
]]>Good news for those who have received $WRITE invitations; there’s a fresh joining process with a few surprises. Big thanks to Seth Thompson at A Lot of Moving Parts for creating the token animation. We find ourselves losing track of time flipping it around 😂
]]>So far we've been onboarding users through Rinkeby, while evolving our on-chain protocol. We call our onboarding model "burn-to-register", because members need 1 $WRITE token to join, and the token must be destroyed once they do so. To do this, our $WRITE token's ERC20 contract has a register function that burns 1 token before calling into a registrar contract that registers the user's ENS name. That registrar contract can only be accessed from the $WRITE token, and so these contracts are tightly coupled, and we have needed to take our time to make sure that they were working well and were very gas-efficient. Over the last two weeks, we finalized this system and deployed it to mainnet. Check out the code on GitHub and the contract on mainnet.
]]>Monetization of publicly accessible written content has never had a strong basis on the internet, since it suffers from the public goods problem. As publishing has moved online, funding for high-quality, long-form writing has broken down.
]]>Mirror has the ambitious vision of redefining publishing online by empowering writers with the tools offered by crypto. We are delighted to share that we've officially closed our first full-stack engineering sprint: the MVP of the Mirror blogging platform. This will allow us to onboard our first writers and serve as the foundation for all the functionality in the future.