Mirror
Valued at $100M in 2021; its new owner shut it down four years later
A blogging platform where writers published to permanent decentralized storage and funded their work by selling essays as NFTs, founded by a former Andreessen Horowitz crypto partner.
- Capital raised (announced)
- Estimated
Recorded announced backing; this is separate from cash received, customer deposits and money recovered.
Funding
| Round | Date | Announced | Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Union Square Ventures investment | 2021 | ||
| Seed rounds (combined) | Unknown |
Announced is what was said at the time. Cash actually received is rarely disclosed and is not assumed to match.
People
| Name | Role | Period | Now | Last checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Denis Nazarov | — | Posted about "a new experiment from the @kiosk team" | Oct 2026 |
Timeline
2020
Writers could mint individual articles as NFTs, as a decentralized alternative to publishing tools such as Medium.
October 2021
Posts were signed by their authors and stored on Arweave, which the company said meant writers did not need to rely on the Mirror team for their work to last.
2 May 2024
Paragraph's founder said his three-person team was half the size of Mirror's and its user base substantially smaller. The plan was proposed by Union Square Ventures, an investor in both.
15 September 2025
Read the full post
Over a year ago, we shared that Mirror and Paragraph were combining forces. In the next month or so, we’re bringing the best of Mirror to Paragraph and winding down Mirror. If you’re a writer on Mirror, all your posts and subscribers will be migrated to Paragraph — no action needed by you! More details in the post below.
How it ended
Acquired
Sixteen months after buying the Mirror product, Paragraph announced it was winding Mirror down over the next month. Every post and subscriber was moved to Paragraph without any action from writers, and visits to Mirror blogs were redirected there.
What happened next
- Founder’s next venture2 May 2024
After selling the Mirror product, the company behind it announced a $10 million round led by Electric Capital for Kiosk, a Farcaster social app for discovering and trading crypto assets, with Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures and Variant also taking part.
Still alive
Open spot
Mirror is gone. Is your publishing platform still running?
Spotlight your project here.
Sources
11 sources behind this page.
- 1Mirror's parent company received $10 million investment from Electric Capital to develop new products · Bitget News (syndicating Cointime) · May 2024
- 2Mirror will gradually shut down over the next month, and the team has decided to focus on Paragraph · ChainCatcher · Sep 2025
- 3Web3 Publishing Platform Mirror Sells to Paragraph, Pivots to Social App 'Kiosk' · CoinDesk · May 2024
- 4Ethereum Blogging Protocol Mirror Embraces Farcaster in Social Media Pivot · Decrypt · May 2024
- 5Blockchain-Based Blog Platform Mirror Opens Access To All · MediaPost (Publishers Daily) · Oct 2021
- 6Mirror to Shut Down, Content Moves to Paragraph · Phemex News · Sep 2025
- 7Doubling Down on Onchain Publishing with Paragraph · Union Square Ventures (investor blog)
- 8Latest posts by @Iiterature · X (via twitterapi.io)
- 9Paragraph on X: winding down Mirror · X (via twitterapi.io) · Sep 2025
- 10X user search results for "Denis Nazarov" (includes @Iiterature) · X (via twitterapi.io)
Show 1 moreShow fewer
- 11Paragraph Absorbs Mirror in Web3 Publishing Consolidation – What Changes for Writers? · Yahoo Finance (syndicating Cryptonews) · Sep 2025
Every figure above is clickable and opens the sources behind it. Copies were stored when each source was read, so a citation still resolves after the page it came from is gone.