Web3 publishing app Mirror is acquired by Paragraph, a rival platform.
The Mirror team will continue to operate independently and shift focus to developing ‘Kiosk’, a Web3 social app based on Farcaster that combines blockchain and e-commerce.
Mirror and Paragraph will eventually merge into a single, unified product suite, according to Paragraph’s founder.
Paragraph, the company behind a range of blockchain-based publishing tools, has acquired Mirror, its biggest competitor in the Web3 creator space.
The Mirror team will continue to operate as a separate company, but will now focus solely on Web3 social media. The team’s main post-mirror project will be ‘Kiosk’, a Twitter-like microblogging platform based on the Farcaster protocol.
Mirror was one of the breakout stars of blockchain’s foray into the creative economy. Launched in 2020, the platform offers writers the opportunity to monetize their work by publishing individual articles as NFTs. It is designed as a more decentralized and censorship-resistant alternative to Web2 publishing tools like Medium.
Paragraph was released in 2022 with similar functionality to Mirror, but more closely resembled Substack, focusing on newsletters and other publications rather than one-off articles.
Paragraph founder Colin Armstrong says his product differed from Mirror, at least initially, because it tried to appeal to more of a Web2 audience. Armstrong, who has written for tech publications in addition to his work as an engineer at Google and Coinbase, says he has also focused his product more on referral programs and other features to help authors increase their distribution. Mirror, meanwhile, managed to develop a stronger brand and design language, Armstrong said.
Ultimately, Mirror and Paragraph “evolved and then ended up in somewhat of a similar place,” according to Paragraph’s founder. “I think it’s often not a clear choice for users which one to choose.”
Mirror, meanwhile, has shifted much of its focus to Kiosk, its Web3 social platform.
“The vision for Kiosk is to be the synthesis of social and commerce,” says Mirror founder Denis Nazarov. Nazarov will remain as an “advisor” to Paragraph, but he and the rest of his team have sold the product so they can focus more on their new platform.
Armstrong says Paragraph’s user base is “significantly smaller” than Mirror’s, and its three-person team is half the size of Mirror’s six-person operation. Neither team disclosed the terms of the acquisition, but Armstrong says the plan was proposed by Union Square Ventures, an investor in both companies.
“Everyone is very positive about the outcome. Mirror gets to continue with its new product, and the Mirror product gets to continue under the leadership of someone who is fully committed to publishing,” Armstrong said. “It’s obviously great for us because it takes our user base and our products to the next level in quite a big way.”
According to Armstrong, Mirror and Paragraph will eventually be merged into one streamlined product.
“We want to combine the products at some point, but in the short to medium term we’re just going to talk to the top makers of both products to determine what people like about each product,” he said.
Welcome, Kiosk
Kiosk is the Mirror team’s attempt to bring blockchains and e-commerce deeper into social media.
It’s technically a ‘client’ for accessing Farcaster, an X-like app built on Ethereum. Customers like Kiosk act as unique lenses through which to view Farcaster’s underlying data; In addition to providing richer views of Farcaster content, customers can build additional functionality and use cases into the protocol.
“There is a potential for an experience where you see not only what people are saying, what they like and who they follow, but also what assets they are buying,” Nazarov said. “We think the whole idea of owning and collecting assets is not just transactional, but also social.”
Mirror featured a polished interface by crypto industry standards when it first launched, and Nazarov says he plans to bring a similar design philosophy to Kiosk.
With Mirror, “we were one of the first web3 products to really bring strong product design, brand and go-to-market DNA – which I think is still quite rare in the ecosystem – combined with a deep understanding of the potential of the technology,” said Nazarov. “We learned that it is very powerful to combine a social container – so tell a story – and then anchor this economic call to action.”
Kiosk’s main function will be to make it easier for users to integrate digital assets directly into their social media posts. You might imagine a message referencing an NFT: while a conventional tweet or Facebook post would just contain a jpeg image representing the NFT, Kiosk would build additional blockchain features directly into the image – such as the ability to view the NFT’s blockchain address, or a feature to purchase it directly through the mail.
“I think a big part of what held crypto back from growing to the next concentric circle of a million, 10 million users was UX,” Nazarov said. UX stands for user experience. “Given that products like Farcaster are pioneers in the mobile native experience, we think there is a big opportunity for this unified social experience that e-commerce naturally brings.”