How Mirror’s offering can inspire us for NFT tooling
By Brian Felsen
Mirror.xyz has gained great traction not only as a web3 publishing tool, but as a platform where others can develop using plugins, as well as the ability to easily integrate popular web3 tools to fund your project or start a DAO.
Our thesis is that NFTs will gain popularity by offering utility, rather than speculation. The primary utility will be access to gated content and experiences, and the secondary would be participation in revenue sharing through crowdfunding and royalty participation. To encourage projects to come onchain to onboard artists and fans en masse through NFT releases, and to encourage games to fundraise through successful NFT releases, we need to develop the tooling that would provide robust functionality for NFT utility.
From Mirror, we've already taken minting from openzeppelin. Re the rest: turning your publication into an NFT (we could do that with a screenshot or something), embedding NFTs within published content (that's easy), adding a CTA button (same), and subscriptions.
Subscriptions are new and interesting but there's not so much "there" there until wallets can really hold content. That's why even most people writing glowingly about mirror are still sending you to their substacks or email lists. The Mirror "wallet-based" subscriptions just push content to your "inbox" which is only visible if the reader is logged into mirror - otherwise, the writers would have to collect email to truly push content. And the other "composible" tools in their subscriptions offering are from other parties: guild.xyz for discord (which I'm using), Coinvise airdrops, Manifold whitelisting, Dune dashboards, and Snapshot.
Per what Stephen suggested, I've been looking at some more interesting projects:
- Been talking with Leon about ghost.org and Next to make a website builder
- gm.xyz for communities which isn't open source yet but is cool
- sigle.io, which is like Wordpress where readers can get Stacks tokens to support and give bitcoin yield to the writers, but uses Hiro wallet
- Orbis.club - another decentralized social network, has open source sdk
- Highlight.xyz is great, and I'm going to reach out to them for access and communities.
None of them are quite at the focus of primitives we need to onboard artists for access or fundraising (either through ecosystem or in-house products), but I'll keep looking.
Still, I feel that one of the most exciting things Mirror is doing is packaging crowdfunding in with their offering, and it's an August deliverable of mine to see how we can fork or build it easily and to integrate it into an artist onboarding flow.
