Today, Mirror is excited to launch Subscribe to Mint, a new way for creators to transform their collectors into an engaged web3 community.

Subscribe to Mint works a lot like an open edition drop, but with a Mirror-native twist. In order to mint, a collector needs to subscribe to a creator’s Mirror publication with their email, bootstrapping a communication channel for creators to engage collectors on a recurring basis.

Subscribe to Mint expands on Mirror’s hallmark web3-native publishing features like web3 subscriptions and Writing NFTs to make it an even more powerful tool for creators and their projects.

Editions are a powerful community catalyst

Over the last several months, creators have experimented with web3 tools that have blazed new trails for community participation. Specifically, the free NFT movement is creating powerful incentives that are catalyzing hundreds of thousands of people to discover new on-chain communities:

• Rainbow and Zora launched a collaborative NFT with >120k collectors in less than a week

• Escher announced a new NFT platform and minted their logo as a collectable with >15k collectors in less than a day

• Checks by Jack Butcher started out as a free open edition and turned into an iconic evolving artwork that sparked dozens of community derivatives

Data shows that thousands of free drops are created monthly with millions of free NFTs collected!

Although these mints have been successful in producing sparks of hype, the long-term engagement opportunity has been restricted by limited options to engage, activate, and retain collectors post-drop.

Audiences are just collecting today, when they should be collecting, subscribing and engaging. Enter Subscribe to Mint.

Large and small projects across web3 have already proven the success of Subscribe to Mint during our recent pilot of the feature:

• Optimism has gathered 334k subscribers with a collectable celebrating their accomplishments last year

• Base has gathered 222k subscribers commemorating the historic collaboration between Base and Optimism with a drop

• UFO has gathered 8k subscribers with a genesis pass for their podcast listeners

Here are two of the many use cases for Subscribe to Mint we’re really excited about:

1. The genesis drop: A recent trend for new web3 projects has been to pair their launch announcements with a collectable NFT featuring the project’s logo or mascot. The ability to collect immediately gives a project more credibility and helps propagate it as a meme. It also serves as a powerful catalyst to rally around a project’s genesis, form community, and promote the announcement. With Subscribe to Mint, that initial spark of interest can be fanned into a durable flame of engagement with a project’s audience through newsletter updates and subsequent drops.

2. The collectable series: A collectable series gives projects the opportunity to strengthen community engagement on a recurring basis. New followers would have a consistent incentive to sign up as subscribers by participating in recurring drops. Existing holders can complete collections of brand assets to show their continued support.

In addition to web3 subscriptions, Subscribe to Mint composes with Writing NFTs — a project’s posts on Mirror can be collected by the audience it bootstraps on Mirror via a genesis NFT campaign. UFO, a web3 podcast, has been a pioneer on this front — each of their posts has sold out and raised an average of 0.5 ETH after a Genesis Pass drop that netted almost 8,000 subscribers.

We’re almost as excited to use this new feature as we are to make it available to you. To celebrate this announcement, we are dropping our own genesis NFT.

Starting now, Subscribe to Mint will be in community beta over the next two weeks, and only accessible to Mirror Genesis NFT holders. Collect the NFT to unlock early access to the tool, future product updates, and beta features.

Finally, a web3 product announcement wouldn’t be complete without inviting a few community members to participate in the launch! We’re excited to share three drops from a diverse group of Mirror projects:

• Zerion Subscriber OGs from Zerion, a leading Web3 wallet

• Invest in Music Pass from a new music media outlet

• Safe Stone from Safe, the most trusted platform to manage digital assets on Ethereum

Subscribe to Mint is completely free to use for creators. If creators set a price for their NFT, they receive 100% of the proceeds. To sustain the development of our tools, Mirror charges a small flat fee per mint to collectors.

Subscribe to Mint NFTs are available to deploy today on Ethereum, Optimism, and Polygon in your dashboard!

Look out for more new features as we continue to make Mirror the best place to create and communicate with your web3 community.