Editor's Note: This article comes fromChain News ChainNews (ID: chainnewscom), published with permission.
Editor's Note: This article comes from
Chain News ChainNews (ID: chainnewscom)
Chain News ChainNews (ID: chainnewscom)
, published with permission.
In Lianwen, we are serious and earnestly looking for blockchain and cryptocurrency native products that may be "out of the circle".
"Serious and serious" means that what we call "out of the circle" does not mean that the topic of blockchain or cryptocurrency appears in traditional or so-called "mainstream" media, as many people understand A strange sense of presence—usually, this sense of presence is more like satisfying the curiosity-seeking mentality of the public, the mentality is humble, and the effect is only short-lived. The real "out of the circle" should be to subtly but powerfully capture ordinary users (individuals or enterprises), change their habits, and then achieve a paradigm shift.
For this reason, we introduced NBA Top Shot, which subverted the star card market, and tracked and reported Centrifuge, which used DeFi to liberate the asset liquidity problem in the supply chain financial link in the real world. Recently, we got excited about a content publishing product created by former a16z crypto partner Denis Nazarov called "Mirror.xyz" (Mirror for short).Let’s keep it a secret first, let’s not talk about Mirror. To better understand the product Mirror, let’s start with an Internet product that happened not too far away but has been forgotten by most Chinese readers.I believe someone should still remember Apple4us. This is a website born in the booming age of Web2.0. It is a group blog composed of many Internet activists in different fields. The theme is everything about Apple, industrial design, products, technology and young people's lifestyles. .
Apple4us was originally initiated by Zhihu investor Zhang Liang. Its members include software engineers, product designers, mathematics researchers, fashion industry figures and many entrepreneurs. Contributors include science fiction writer Minus Er, Zhihu founder Zhou Yuan, Zhihu Co-founder Huang Jixin, IPN founder Li Ruyi, NOMO founder Fliggy and others.
The quality of the articles output by this group blog is very high, and it has also influenced many people. To this day, there are still many people
miss it
, and even because of it, there was a question-and-answer website known as Zhihu.
The reason is that Zhou Yuan, the founder of Zhihu, once summed it up like this: "Apple4us does not determine the topic selection and write articles like an editorial department. They are just answering questions. We have a discussion group, and every day we will share the questions we want to know. Throw it in. Why is the accuracy of the iPhone virtual keyboard so high? How to evaluate the creativity of Apple’s TVC advertising? What should the future of reading be? If these people with the same interests and different professional fields are connected together, they can almost immediately give useful and helpful answers from their respective professional perspectives.”
To summarize Zhou Yuan’s meaning: Compared with professional media, the reason why Apple4us can produce higher-quality and more influential articles is that these creators are more problem-conscious. In addition, a more critical point is that group blogs are more loosely organized and do not consider professional backgrounds, but connect a group of like-minded people in different professional fields, which allows them to learn from their respective majors almost immediately. Angle gives useful, helpful answers.
However, Apple4us is no longer updated, and the latest update of the website is in January 2018. The last maintainer of the website, Li Ruyi, has sealed it forever as "The History of Chinese Science and Technology in the Early 21st Century".
This loose organizational form allows Apple4us to produce high-quality articles, but it cannot be sustained for a long time. The reason is that there is no commercial realization ability, and it is impossible to maintain the long-term livelihood of these original authors. That's why Zhou Yuan started his next venture, creating Zhihu, a vertical question-and-answer website favored by capital.
Maybe post-90s readers have never read Apple4us's articles, nor are they interested in learning about this Internet history. However, revisiting the old stories of Apple4us, we can more clearly see the problems of today's Internet: content quality and livelihood cannot be balanced. This is a long-standing dilemma.
Thanks to the blockchain, the ownership economy, and the various Web 3 applications that have emerged today, such problems can be solved.
This is the great ambition of Mirror, an online content publishing platform. It tries to combine NFT and the ownership economy to redefine online content publishing, which will have a revolutionary impact on online content creation and may bring direct circle-breaking growth.
Mirror creator Denis Nazarov was previously a partner at a16z crypto. At present, he has left the Silicon Valley venture capital giant to devote himself to the Mirror experiment.
The core innovation of Mirror is that it combines the ownership economic model built by DAO, Web3, and NFT to provide a set of crowdfunding tools for content creators to solve the problem of creators who "can't make money and can't realize the value of content". Not only that, early investors can even earn future income from content through their own keen sense of smell.
Crypto Ownership Economy and Internet of Value
Before introducing Mirror's implementation plan and vision in depth, let's take a look at the fundamental problems in the content production and distribution system in today's Internet age.
The Internet has leveled the world and brought about the free flow of information, allowing people to obtain and send free information unlimitedly to anyone in the world as long as there is an Internet connection. Thanks to the Internet, online content has become more and more abundant, but problems have also emerged-it is not easy to monetize writing, and the most common way to monetize is to sell advertisements. This model is easy to make most writers frantically pursue the realization of traffic, and high-quality writing has been unable to survive on this for a long time, and it has become a tragedy of the commons.
With the gradual decline of traditional media and the development of online media, more and more content is released online. However, there are fewer and fewer high-quality long-form content, including Apple4us we mentioned above.
Most of the time, high-quality writing on the Internet cannot realize the realization of knowledge, let alone make money and profit, and it can be regarded as a main business to maintain a long-term livelihood.
The root cause of this situation is that information sharing is a native property of the Internet, which is defined by a series of interoperable protocols and file formats, and is transmitted independently between two nodes in the network in the form of the basic unit "bit". Value sharing is attached to the old financial and monetary infrastructure that is still in the pre-Internet era. This existing Internet system can transmit and share "information", but it cannot effectively transmit "value".
However, with Bitcoin, the blockchain, the emergence of various cryptoeconomic primitives, and the rise of the ownership economy, we can hope to solve this problem at its root. This is exactly the great ambition of the online content publishing platform Mirror - to change the original content creation, consumption and profit models with the NFT ownership economy, and redefine online content publishing.
Integrate various Web 3 native applications
Mirror has released the minimum usability product MVP prototype in December 2020, from which you can get a preliminary understanding of the infrastructure of the Mirror content publishing platform.
From the perspective of technical implementation, Mirror has been a Web 3 application since its birth, and has various native attributes of Web 3.
Not only is it decentralized, but it integrates crypto-native currencies from the beginning and gives creators more control and ownership by binding digital identities. These characteristics allow Mirror to have multiple attributes of digital native information carriers that many Internet applications lack, including programmability, interoperability, composability, virus transmission and transferability, and then realize its value exchange. possible.
Of course, the concept of Web 3 has been described in different ways by people with various purposes, and the realization of Mirror presented to us with a minimum usability product makes us truly believe that blockchain and its related underlying technologies After years of development, the infrastructure has been built, and there are basic components available to support a product similar to the Internet experience.
Let's take a look at Mirror's technical implementation.
Before launching Mirror, the founder Denis Nazarov had already done a lot of technical practice in this direction. At the beginning of 2020, Denis Nazarov, who was still a partner at a16z crypto at the time, launched FEEDweave, a decentralized social networking platform based on the Arweave blockchain, in an attempt to develop and test "data Lego" in the blockchain ecosystem.
At that time, he used the Arweave blockchain to experiment with structured file storage, and split the elements of the social platform into Widgets that can be used flexibly by DApp developers, thus providing developers with news sources, social graph relationships, comments, Components such as list algorithms and reputation systems make any combination of "data Lego" possible. For example, developers can let users pay attention to each other by integrating the micro-app "social graph". At the same time, developers can also make full use of the network effect of the social relationship graph of other applications on Arweave. Developers can directly integrate "arweave-id" instead of redeveloping an identity system. Due to the immutable nature of the blockchain, users cannot edit posts by default, but must use a diff operation similar to git to implement editing. In the future, editing may be implemented through a micro-app called "diff-edit".
The experiment of FEEDweave has accumulated valuable experience for Denis Nazarov, and the influence also contributed to the choice of Mirror's technical architecture.
In terms of content storage, Mirror uses the decentralized data storage protocol Arweave to store data and achieve permanent storage, including the content published by the creator and all related changes, and all the information required to verify the authenticity of the author's identity. Arweave not only provides permanent data storage, but only pays once for the first upload. Mirror's storage fee for each blog post is only about 0.00005 AR, which is currently worth about $0.000249.
Mirror also integrates decentralized domain name service
After the content is published, it is signed and confirmed by the user using the key. Mirror has released a backend API gateway that connects clients and protocols, allowing users to perform signature verification before publishing to Arweave, or pay for Arweave content themselves, and cache entry content with extremely fast response times.
Every piece of content published on Mirror has a copyright statement to prove the ownership of an item, and will be presented as structured data (such as JSON Object). In addition, authored content can also lead to comments, that is, user-generated content.
The content after "seal" confirmation will be displayed at the bottom of the content page with three metadata: "Arweave Transaction ID", "Contributor Ethereum Address" and "Content Summary". All information is publicly viewable on the blockchain, so anyone can verify whether an item of content was written by a specific Ethereum account. All published entries and every content change need to be signed by the user with a signature key, and then published to store data on Arweave. This key pair does not contain any direct economic value.
"Stamp" can be addressed based on content, and the confirmed content will be displayed at the bottom of the content page with three metadata: "Arweave transaction ID", "contributor Ethereum address" and "content summary"
In addition, Mirror strictly follows "never directly store the user's Ethereum private key in the browser" to avoid security and privacy risks.
Since Mirror supports a key- and signature-based authorization model, this native authentication approach has the added benefit of eliminating the need for email for things like registration and content recovery.
The backend of Mirror is written in Rust language, so that it will be easier to integrate the two-layer expansion solution in the future.
"Content Crowdfunding DAO" that empowers writers with content sovereignty
From the perspective of product form, the Mirror platform is a crowdfunding platform for individual content. Unlike mainstream content publishing platforms, Mirror is a Web 3 native content publishing platform, which means that since its birth, Mirror has bound value attributes , the digital content published on it is endowed with value through NFT tokenization, and the ownership of a single content can be sold to multiple investors through crowdfunding.It can be said that a small decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) with relevant interests has been formed around a single article on Mirror, in which creators, as content producers, are bound to the content through the ENS identity system. When publishing an article, the creator needs to log in through the signature key to obtain writing authority, publish content, and perform data confirmation; the creator earns start-up funds by publishing content crowdfunding, and retains part of the NFT shares, and investors hold There is partial ownership of the article, and each NFT transfer can bring a certain percentage of benefits to the entire token holder, including the author and NFT holder.
Let's take the first crowdfunding event launched on the Mirror platform as an example to see how an actual article crowdfunding works.
This is a writing crowdfunding campaign by former Snapchat software engineer and product designer John Palmer. The crowdfunding kicks off on Thursday, January 28th at 12pm PST with a target amount of 2 ETH tokens, and if the funding goal is met, the work will be published for free to read and share by all, backers If the funding goal is not met, the participant will receive a refund.
the event
One hour after the launch, the fundraising was overfulfilled with 9.9865 ETH, and 63 backers invested.
This article will mint an NFT representing ownership on the Zora protocol. Funders can send Ethereum to obtain ESSAY tokens representing the share of the NFT. ESSAY and other ERC-20 tokens can be freely transferred and redeemed for ETH . Every time an NFT is changed hands, ESSAY token holders will receive a 10% handling fee, and John Palmer himself will hold 35% of the total supply of ESSAY tokens.
This kind of crowdfunding effect will bring a lot of attention to the author, and it is more likely to further push up the price of the article content, which is very imaginative.
Content WritingCrowdfundingNFT Ownership Economy
The biggest innovation of Mirror is to embrace a brand-new ownership economic model, which is different from the previous fine-tuning model of knowledge payment, which can be said to have fundamentally changed the structure of content creation.
The fundamental change means that content creators can no longer rely on advertisements and pursue liquidity, but provide high-quality content for specific reader groups to maintain a possibility of self-sufficiency. In this ecology that introduces the NFT token equity model In the process, a closed loop of production, investment, transfer and consumption based on content works is formed, so as to realize a self-sufficient writer community economy.
So how does this model work? How to realize the possibility of writers on the platform to obtain economic benefits through content output?
The Mirror platform allows content creators to initiate crowdfunding for a single piece of content, and supports an NFT to represent the ownership of the article. Funders can use cryptocurrencies to purchase shares of the NFT for support or investment.
Here it is necessary to popularize the NFT format first. The full name of NFT is Non-Fungible Token, which is the opposite of Fungible. It is translated into non-homogeneous tokens, which means that each one is irreplaceable and unique. Each NFT has a unique ID number and can be distinguished. Smart contract identification on the blockchain. This unique property makes NFT a natural ideal for recording and storing ownership of digital products including artwork, games, and collectibles. Intellectual property is one of the largest usage scenarios of NFT, in which NFT can be used to mark the ownership of digital content works, such as pictures, videos, blogs, music, artwork, etc.
When a content work has a value representation, it brings many benefits. It allows many participants to join in, realize value circulation, and form a price.
So far, NFT has made the original content works that have no marginal cost and can be copied infinitely scarce, thus endowed with value, and can be freely traded and resold on the decentralized trading platform without permission. This means that writers can now sell NFT, a scarce digital asset representing ownership of their content, as a unique collectible or artwork, while the content itself remains an open and freely accessible public good (Public Goods ).
Mirror founder Denis Nazarov launched a poll on Twitter to support which cryptocurrency to use to buy NFT. The results of the poll showed that 57% of users supported the use of Ethereum as a payment token.
If a creator wants to invest in long-form writing, it means that there may be no other source of income for a long time, and Mirror provides a platform for writers to initiate a fundraising for their upcoming writing projects, After the promoter casts an NFT representing the ownership of the article through a smart contract, it can be opened to investors for purchase with cryptocurrency (ETH or DAI), and the creator can withdraw the raised funds as the initial capital for writing.
For investors, if you happen to be a loyal reader of the author, you can purchase part of the ownership of the NFT to fund your favorite author. Since the NFT represents the ownership of the work, once the content work is in If you succeed in the future, you can also get a permanent and continuous sharing income (similar to royalties). The creator can set the transfer fee by himself, that is, the charging rate for each NFT is transferred. Due to the unique identity attributes of NFT, these fans can also get an NFT badge that is certified as the sponsor of the article.
It should be noted that although the ownership of a single content work is limited to one NFT, the ownership of this NFT is fragmented and compatible with ERC20 format contracts, and can be jointly owned by multiple people according to the share ratio, with a fixed share of NFT It means that the holder can get the transfer fee of the content.
Mirror supports inserting NFT format files in the content of the article. Clicking can directly jump to other NFT platforms, allowing users to directly use cryptocurrency to purchase
Of course, if you are not a fan of the author, but a pure speculator with vision (no derogatory meaning here), then you can also invest in NFT in the early stage, and redeem the basic funds and income by reselling NFT shares , to earn arbitrage income. Because NFTs on Mirror are compatible with the ERC20 format, NFTs representing content ownership can be traded on decentralized exchanges like Uniswap, similar to trading options.
Specifically, before the writing of a piece of content begins, the steps for creators to initiate crowdfunding include the following two steps:
Step 1: Crowdfunding/investment before article writing starts
1. The author mints an NFT representing the ownership of the article in the crowdfunding contract, and then can withdraw the crowdfunded cryptocurrency (such as Ethereum) to start writing
2. Users with investment intentions are called contributors here, and can send Ethereum to the crowdfunding contract to obtain the ownership of the NFT. It should be noted that the NFT here can be fragmented and owned by multiple people.
Step 2: Redemption/Divestment Steps After Writing
