Bihu和Mirror为何失败：东西方最有前途的加密货币社交平台的兴衰区块链近期，以太坊联合创始人 Vitalik Buterin 于 2026 年 1 月 21 日在 Twitter/X 上发文，表示“2026 年，我计划全面回归去中心化社交。”Vitalik Buterin 1 月 21 日 Twitter 截图 两天后，在 1 月 23 日的 Twitter Space 上（吴硕区块链主办），Vitalik 指出了一系列许多加密社交项目共有的共同问题。他还提到了几个曾经成功但最终失败的加密社交平台，其中包括“币乎”。 吴硕区块链推特空间1月23日截图 历史上，东方和西方都产生了最具代表性的加密社交/内容平台之一——中国的币乎和西方的Mirror.xyz。两者都曾展现出强大的产品与市场契合度，并被广泛视为Web3时代“去中心化内容创作”的领先候选者：Bihu开创了中国加密社区的“内容+激励”模式，而Mirror则成为明星项目，常被称为“加密版的Substack + Medium”，并得到了顶级风险投资的支持
估值超过1亿美元。但最终，两个平台都下跌了。为什么这些“最有前途”的产品未能逃脱同样的命运？ Bihu：东方加密社交平台的先驱——悄然没落 Bihu成立于2018年初，正值上一个加密周期的巅峰时期。当时，中文加密内容创作者面临着一系列非常现实的问题：微信群难以归档和积累价值，微博过于碎片化，微信公众号并没有真正属于创作者本身，传统的论坛系统已经在衰落。 Bihu徽标截图 Bihu的解决方案很简单：引入基于代币的激励，让“编写加密内容”本身成为一项可持续的活动。用户可以通过publis赚取KEY代币
Why Bihu and Mirror Failed: The Rise and Fall of the Most Promising Crypto Social Platforms in the East and West
Author | Jian, WuBlockchain
Recently, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin posted on Twitter/X on January 21, 2026, stating that “in 2026, I plan to fully return to decentralized social.”
Screenshot of Vitalik Buterin’s January 21 Twitter
Two days later, during a Twitter Space on January 23 (hosted by Wu Shuo Blockchain), Vitalik pointed out a set of common problems shared by many crypto social projects. He also mentioned several crypto social platforms that were once successful but ultimately failed, including “Bihu.”
Screenshot of Wu Shuo Blockchain’s January 23 Twitter Space
Historically, the East and the West each produced one of the most representative crypto social/content platforms-China’s Bihu and the West’s Mirror.xyz. Both once demonstrated strong product–market fit and were widely seen as leading candidates for “decentralized content creation” in the Web3 era: Bihu pioneered the “content + incentives” model in China’s crypto community, while Mirror emerged as a star project often described as a “crypto version of Substack + Medium,” backed by top-tier venture capital and valued at over $100 million.
Yet in the end, both platforms declined. Why did these “most promising” products fail to escape the same fate?
Bihu: A Pioneer of Crypto Social Platforms in the East-and Its Quiet Decline
Bihu was founded in early 2018, at the peak of the previous crypto cycle. At the time, Chinese-language crypto content creators faced a very practical set of problems:
WeChat groups were difficult to archive and accumulate value, Weibo was overly fragmented, WeChat official accounts did not truly belong to creators themselves, and traditional forum systems were already in decline.
Screenshot of the Bihu logo
Bihu’s solution was straightforward: introduce token-based incentives and make “writing crypto content” itself a sustainable activity. Users could earn KEY tokens by publishing articles, commenting, and engaging with others, while the community determined content visibility through voting mechanisms. For a period, the platform became a preferred venue for domestic KOLs to share views and for project teams to publish statements.
During its most active phase in 2018–2019, Bihu accumulated tens of thousands of registered users within the Chinese crypto community, becoming one of the key platforms for KOL opinion output and long-form project communications at the time. Many Chinese crypto bloggers who remain active on X (Twitter) today earned their first meaningful “content income” on Bihu.
In form, Bihu more closely resembled a “crypto-native version of the WeChat official account system combined with early Substack.” It did not heavily emphasize a grand narrative of “decentralized social networking,” yet in practice it functioned as a public space for discussion within the crypto community.
At its peak, the KEY token price surged above $0.01, and the platform was widely regarded as the “Eastern version of Steemit,” even seen as having the potential to challenge WeChat official accounts within the crypto vertical.
The real problems emerged later. As the market entered a downturn, the marginal effectiveness of token incentives for content production declined rapidly. Speculative motivations began to outweigh genuine content sharing, low-quality posts and engagement farming increased, and community governance mechanisms proved insufficient to enforce standards. After 2021, China’s tightening regulatory environment for crypto further constrained user growth and funding. The platform gradually ceased updates and maintenance, and on March 21, 2022, Bihu officially shut down operations.
Screenshot of the Bihu shutdown announcement
Why Bihu Failed
Bihu’s core problem lay in its excessive reliance on a token-based economic model, effectively turning what was originally a “social sharing” platform into a bare-bones “money-making game.” In its early days, users could earn KEY token rewards by publishing high-quality crypto analysis, project reviews, or investment insights, which did succeed in stimulating community enthusiasm. However, as the KEY token price collapsed from its 2018 peak, with trading volume dropping to nearly zero after August 2021, and by early 2026 falling to around $0.00035 (according to CoinDesk data, with 24-hour trading volume effectively at zero and market capitalization evaporating by nearly 100%), users’ core motivations quickly disintegrated.
KEY token data. Source: CoinDesk
Once the financial incentive disappeared, high-quality content creators began to leave en masse. The platform was soon flooded with low-effort posts, engagement farming, and mutual upvoting. This phenomenon is essentially what can be described as “financialized attention”: users’ attention became entirely tied to price fluctuations rather than serving genuine improvements in information quality or the construction of real human relationships. Bihu serves as a textbook example of this dynamic-once the token became the sole incentive, the platform degenerated from a content community into a speculative casino.
Beyond this, the combined impact of regulatory pressure and market cycles further accelerated Bihu’s decline. China’s crypto environment tightened dramatically after the September 24, 2021 regulatory notice (including comprehensive bans on mining and crackdowns on exchanges). As a domestic platform, Bihu struggled to secure new funding, and user growth stalled outright. The breakdown of funding during the bear market, compounded by regulatory headwinds, caused active user counts to plunge from peak levels of over 100,000 to just a few thousand. The deterioration of the content ecosystem then became a vicious cycle: early on, the platform was filled with in-depth analysis and high-quality KOL contributions; later, speculative posts dominated, governance mechanisms failed, low-quality content went largely unpunished, incentives for high-quality creators disappeared, retention collapsed, and the platform ultimately fell into a deadlock of “no one maintaining it, and no one consuming it.”
Mirror.xyz: A Star of Web3 Publishing in the West-and Its Inevitable Farewell
If Bihu represented a pragmatic solution rooted in the Chinese-language context, Mirror was a more idealistic and systematically designed experiment in the English-speaking world.
Screenshot of the Mirror interface
Mirror.xyz was founded in October 2020 by Denis Nazarov, a former partner at a16z Crypto, and quickly rose to prominence during the 2021 bull market. It positioned itself as an “on-chain publishing platform,” where users could write articles that were directly minted as NFTs, allowing readers to support creators through purchases and collections.
In its early stages, Mirror introduced $WRITE as a credential for writing and governance. Through community voting, creators were periodically selected and granted publishing rights. This mechanism-combining “writing access” with NFT-based publishing-enabled Mirror to rapidly attract a cohort of crypto-native writers in its early phase.
In June 2021, Mirror received investment from institutions including Union Square Ventures (USV). According to media reports, its valuation was estimated at around $100 million, and it was often described as “the crypto version of WeChat Official Accounts” or “Substack on the blockchain.” All content was fully on-chain, with ownership retained by creators and data being immutable and portable-features that were widely seen as revolutionary at the time.
Reported by The Information
Based on data from 2021, user growth was rapid: within just a few months of launch, Mirror had attracted several hundred writers. Prominent figures-including Vitalik Buterin himself-also published articles on the platform. According to an analysis posted on Reddit in 2022, the number of monthly active writers grew from 380 to 607. Although the growth rate slowed, Mirror was still widely regarded as a benchmark for Web3 publishing.
2022 analysis from the Reddit r/ethereum subreddit
The Endgame of Mirror
If Bihu’s decline was driven more by external conditions and the failure of its incentive model, Mirror’s ending was the result of a combination of market cycles, product limitations, and internal disagreements over direction.
The 2022 crypto bear market-marked by the collapses of Terra and FTX-brought Mirror’s growth to an abrupt halt. While the number of writers continued to increase slowly, it fell far short of expectations. New users faced high entry barriers (wallet setup and gas fees), and the content ecosystem struggled to develop meaningful network effects.
Beyond market cycles and user growth constraints, long-standing internal disagreements over product direction and governance are widely seen as another key factor that hindered Mirror’s evolution.
In its early days, Mirror rapidly attracted a core group of creators and supporters around the vision of “on-chain publishing.” As the project scaled, however, divisions gradually emerged within the team over whether Mirror should remain a “neutral writing infrastructure” or evolve into a product with stronger social features and user-growth orientation.
On one side, parts of the community and some team members hoped Mirror would continue expanding its feature set, lower the barrier to entry, and attract more non-crypto-native creators. On the other, a different faction preferred to position Mirror as a decentralized publishing protocol or tool layer, rather than a mass-market content platform. This divergence in positioning made it difficult for Mirror to align on product pacing, resource allocation, and long-term goals.
These tensions did not remain purely theoretical; they repeatedly surfaced in community discussions and in the platform’s actual product development.
Between 2022 and 2023, discussions increasingly appeared within the Mirror community questioning why the platform had not introduced basic features such as user accounts, recommendation systems, and comment interactions. Some creators and readers argued that beyond the writing experience, Mirror lacked the product capabilities necessary to support long-term retention and attract non-crypto-native users. Others explicitly opposed any move toward a “centralized content platform,” arguing that Mirror’s core value lay in providing creators with a permissionless, composable on-chain publishing tool, and that growth should be restrained to avoid platformization.
This divide was also reflected in public statements from the team. Mirror founder Denis Nazarov repeatedly emphasized that Mirror did not intend to compete directly with Web2 platforms such as Substack or Medium on user scale, but rather aimed to serve as publishing infrastructure for native crypto creators. Within this framework, Mirror’s product evolution remained deliberately restrained, with more resources devoted to experimental modules such as NFTs and crowdfunding-based writing, rather than growth-oriented features for mainstream users.
In May 2024, Mirror was acquired by competitor Paragraph, and the founding team pivoted to Kiosk, a social application built on Farcaster. In mid-September 2025, Paragraph announced that Mirror would be gradually sunset, with content and subscribers guided to migrate to the new platform. This decision marked the end of Mirror as an independent entity.
Migration of Mirror to the new platform, Paragraph
Mirror’s Failure Path and Shared Structural Weaknesses
Mirror’s decline closely mirrors that of Bihu, though it also carries the distinctive imprint of Western VC-driven narratives. At its peak, the platform leveraged the $WRITE token competition and NFT minting mechanisms to attract hundreds of active writers during the 2021 bull market, becoming a preferred venue for Crypto KOLs to publish in-depth content.
However, once the bear market arrived, high gas fees combined with the retreat of NFT speculation caused user growth to stall almost immediately, and network effects failed to materialize. After being acquired by Paragraph in May 2024, the founding team pivoted to Kiosk, a social application built on Farcaster. In September 2025, Paragraph officially announced the shutdown of Mirror, with all content migrated elsewhere-effectively a different form of abandonment.
Mirror’s underlying issue was similarly rooted in the short-termism of token- and NFT-based incentives. In the short run, speculation and profit-driven behavior drove rapid engagement, but over time, token inflation and price collapse diluted content quality, and users increasingly treated the platform as a “minting tool” rather than a long-term creative home.
In discussions in early 2026, Vitalik Buterin noted that many such projects tend to start “from finance rather than from social needs,” prioritizing the addition of financial layers-tokens, NFTs, competitions-while neglecting core social challenges such as high-quality content discovery, relationship portability, and decentralized identity.
While Mirror succeeded in addressing content ownership, the inherent barriers of crypto-wallet setup and gas fees-discouraged mainstream creators. As a result, its product–market fit remained limited, with the user base plateauing at just over 600 writers, far from the millions of users reached by platforms like Substack or Medium.
East–West Comparison: Shared Failure Patterns and Subtle Differences
Bihu and Mirror-one rooted in an Eastern, local crypto community, the other backed by top-tier Western venture capital (including a16z and USV)-ultimately shared several fatal structural weaknesses.
First was their reliance on market cycles: both took off during bull markets and were exposed during downturns. Bihu surged with the momentum of the 2018 cycle, while Mirror rode the 2021 bull market to a valuation exceeding $100 million. Once bear markets arrived, funding dried up and user attrition became inevitable.
Second, the short-termism inherent in token and NFT incentives pushed both platforms into the trap of “financialized attention.” Users increasingly treated them as profit-seeking tools; when price bubbles burst, high-quality content and genuine interaction quickly evaporated.
In practice, these systems tended to reward social capital rather than content quality, ultimately serving traders more than creators. In addition, both faced the same structural challenges of network effects and cold starts, struggling to break through the entrenched user bases of traditional platforms.
The differences lay primarily in external conditions. Bihu was more directly impacted by China’s regulatory pressures-especially the 2021 crypto crackdown-and by the breakdown of community governance, leading to a sharper and more abrupt decline. Mirror, by contrast, was constrained by Web3-specific barriers such as gas fees and wallet complexity, as well as by industry consolidation: following its acquisition by Paragraph in 2024, the original product was effectively abandoned.
Despite these differences, both reached similar endpoints. Bihu faded quietly into irrelevance, while Mirror was acquired and later migrated (in September 2025), with the founding team moving on to other ventures.
Reflections on Web3 Social and Possible Paths Forward
The stories of Bihu and Mirror are classic examples of Web3 idealism colliding with the harsh realities of the market. They demonstrated the potential of blockchain in content ownership and direct monetization, but they also exposed a critical flaw: when “social” is hijacked by “finance,” platforms shift from being tools for communication into speculative casinos.
In early 2026, in public discussions on Twitter/X, Vitalik argued that the future of decentralized social lies in a “shared data layer + competition among multiple clients,” rather than simply adding tokens. He expressed optimism about protocol-layer projects such as Farcaster and Lens, which place greater emphasis on “social itself”-encrypted communication, portable identity, and information quality-rather than price speculation. The eventual winners may be hybrid models that start from genuine social pain points and only cautiously integrate economic incentives, such as subscription-based approaches combined with on-chain elements (for example, Paragraph).
The exits of Bihu and Mirror are not endings, but warnings. For crypto social platforms to be reborn, they must heed Vitalik’s advice: speculative tokens are not a universal solution. Truly valuable platforms serve people, not price charts. Perhaps the next generation of Web3 social products, having absorbed these lessons, will be able to go further.
Screenshot of Vitalik Buterin’s January 21 Twitter
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