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.

Mirror has always been a place for web3 creators to publish and make announcements. The output has encompassed project and product launches, whitepapers, thought leadership, education, fundraising announcements, and NFT drops. But until now, there hasn't been a way for communities to stay engaged through notifications.

Mirror takes subscriptions a step further by centering it around a web3 wallet, rather than an email address. We believe wallets are the fundamental representation of identity in web3, and creators will want to build a community represented by wallets rather than emails. A "hello world" post, whitepaper, or manifesto that marks the genesis of any important project on Mirror can now enable its audience to subscribe, creating a social and economic link between community and project.

The Future of Community is Wallet-Native

The social and economic characteristics of wallets already converge across web3 in activities like NFT collection and participation in community governance, but that’s just the beginning. Socially, wallets are evolving into the means by which everyone in web3 communicates, interacts, and follows each other. Blurring the lines between social and economic identity presents a completely new design space with enormous opportunities for the next generation of social applications. At Mirror, our mission is to build great publishing tools at this junction.

For the next generation of creators and builders, a wallet-based community will be an immeasurably powerful asset. In web3, community isn’t about passive consumption, liking, or sharing—wallets transform a community into active participants via collection, ownership, patronage, and governance participation. Wallet-based communities can facilitate new creation models, new engagement models, and new business models.

For creators and projects that don't yet have a community of wallets, we believe publishing on Mirror should be the first step in that direction. Every big idea that sparks a movement begins with a story, and now it can inspire a reader to subscribe and join yours.

Wallet-based subscriptions also deliver on the broader promise of web3— composability with other tools used daily in the ecosystem, such as community chat rooms, token gated drops, and community analytics dashboards. And vice versa—in the future Mirror will be able to compose with pre-existing lists of wallets or tokens, to enable functionality such as community-gated content.

Non-web3 tools have been used in combination with wallets towards similar ends, but ultimately fell short as community-building exercises. "Drop your ENS" was a viral phenomenon on Twitter last year, but created more noise than utility because it wasn't productized in a web3-native way. Critically, there was no easy way to communicate with people that shared their wallets with you. Twitter just wasn’t the right place for that. Mirror is the right place to engage with an on-chain community at scale, because it is purposefully built to be. On Mirror, you could generate the same level of attention, but the end result will be the foundation of your community, all starting with the delivery of your post directly to their inboxes.

Wallet-based subscriptions on Mirror make community updates a core tool in the web3 ecosystem. We can only begin to imagine what you’ll be able to do with a list of your community members’ wallets, but here are some potential use cases that are available right now:

• Subscribe to essays from leading web3 thinkers
• Subscribe to weekly updates from the best DAOs and web3 projects
• Token-gated experiences for subscribers
• Token and NFT airdrops to subscribers
• Whitelisting subscribers for NFT mints
• Dune dashboards to analyze subscriber preferences and activity
• Subscriber-only governance proposals

Wallet-based subscriptions also pair perfectly with collectible entries on Mirror. Your audience can collect their favorite writing from you on-chain and also subscribe to you so they never miss what you publish next, never miss an opportunity to collect an entry, and never miss a call to action from your project.

Today, it all starts with the delivery of your next Mirror entry directly to your community member's inbox, establishing a vital social and economic link via their wallet.

We can't wait to see how you and your community use Mirror's wallet-based subscriptions. :)

If you want to hear more from the Mirror team, click “Subscribe.” And then go find your favorite Mirror publications and subscribe to them, too! If you’re a creator, you can now invite your audience to subscribe to you in your dashboard.