When talking about NFTs most people think in pictures, avatars and speculation. Even though all of that exist -and it’s fine- I want to explain an use case where NFTs have utility in new ways. I’m talking about mirror.xyz, an innovative crypto platform.

Mirror is hard to understand at first sight. Their ideas are cutting edge, they’re ahead in the crypto space. Their goal is to create a media platform that allows writers to express themselves and to monetize their writings using decentralized platforms. To reach those goals, they’re creating a platform that is user-owned using crypto networks. But how they do that?

The Mirror platform

They do all of these by combining some parts together. Let’s review them.

The $WRITE token

This token is the one that gives you access to the platform. Only holders of the $WRITE token can be a writer in the platform by burning the invitation token. Even though Mirror is not a DAO yet, it looks like it could be one in the future by airdropping some governance token to its users.

User content

Content is hosted on Arweave, a blockchain for data storage similar to IPFS. Content is signed with a signing key to prove authorship. All posts are stored and retrieved from the blockchain. Mirror doesn’t own any data.

The domain or the Mirror land

Owners of the $WRITE token can claim a publication in Mirror by burning the token. A publication is a ENS subdomain under the mirror.xyz domain that points to a user-managed mirror blog. By using ENS, users have total control over the domain. Then, users are owners of their domain and content.

A frontend and a backend API

This part is centralized, but it’s legit to do so. Anyone could build another frontend and another API to do the same as Mirror as the content and the domain are not in their control.

The frontend is the blogging editor and the blog itself. The backend API is the part that retrieves content from the blockchain and performs actions related to NFTs or blockchain related stuff.

The $WRITE race

Another cool thing they’re doing is the race. The race is an innovative way of letting users enter into the platform. It’s an alternative to the closed invite model. The race allows users of the platform to cast votes to candidates that want to use the platform. This way, users have control of who should write in Mirror. Winners earn a $WRITE token, so they can claim a Mirror blog by burning it. The race is done once per week.

Reinventing writers monetization

All of this is already a great idea. It’s creating a decentralized blogging platform. But Mirror is not only that, it also provides multiple ways to let users monetize their writing through tokens. This is true innovative. They have some different ways of monetizing the work.

• Founding block – A way of creating crowdfunds by minting and selling tokens.
• Auctions – A way of minting and auctioning single edition NFTs.
• Editions – Allows to mint and sell limited editions of NFTs.
• Splits – Allows to split money received to multiple Ethereum accounts. Great for collaboration.

One cool thing about their platform is that NFTs are natively supported. You can embed any NFT into a post and it will dynamically show things like owner, prices, bids, etc. This way you can showcase the economic history of the post. This feature will be a standard in blogging platforms.

Ownership, the ultimate engagement mechanism

These are different new ways for writers to earn some money and collaborate in a very special way. There were no ways before to contribute to a writer through ownership. From my point of view, ownership is the most powerful engagement and the one that connects more deeply an author with its readers.

Through ownership, the reader becomes a writer’s partner through the possession of his work. Also, it allows the relationship to evolve in the open crypto market. Tokens can be sold if the reader no longer identifies with the writer or for any other reason, even just a monetary one. But also it can be a new way of support through donation that is very popular among content creators.

Conclusions

Mirror is an innovative decentralized blogging platform that is setting the standard of the future on writing and monetization using the blockchain. It allows writers and readers to engage in new ways through token ownership. They have also invented a new cool way of invitation method called the race.

More reading

• Mirror development blog. If you’re interested in their development.
• The $WRITE race. If you want to try to join.
• Patrick Rivera (Mirror developer) blog. Lots of good insights related to Mirror and crypto.
• The post describing the Mirror MVP. Very insightful.
• Arweave. Decentralized storage.