Today, we're thrilled to announce our investment in Paragraph, the leading platform enabling onchain publishing. Paragraph is joining forces with our portfolio company Mirror, which first defined many of today’s onchain publishing primitives.  

The vision of "onchain publishing" is to rebuild content creation, distribution, and monetization on web3 rails.  

This allows creators to truly own their content as digital assets: onchain posts and media are owned directly by web3 identities (e.g., accounts on Ethereum or other blockchains), and in the case of Paragraph and Mirror, content is stored publicly and permanently in Arweave. 

Onchain publishing also unlocks powerful new engagement and revenue models: for example, minting posts as NFTs, rewarding subscribers with tokens, enabling perpetual royalties, and tipping creators.  

Just as significantly, the onchain publishing stack empowers developers to compose and build novel experiences directly on the content layer itself in a permissionless manner. Use cases span embedded newsletter subscriptions, layered newsfeed UIs, spam detection algorithms, new discovery surfaces, AI-driven features, and much more – all interoperable and retaining the built-in economic components.

Mirror was the pioneering project that gave creators their first taste of these web3 content and economic primitives back in 2020. Paragraph has expanded on this vision, attracting thousands of writers, newsletters, brands and communities by making onchain publishing more accessible and user-friendly, and by integrating tightly with emerging social protocols such as Farcaster and XMTP.

Paragraph will continue to be led by CEO Colin Armstrong, and Mirror’s Denis Nazarov will remain an advisor to the project.  Denis and the team that has developed Mirror to date will continue building at the intersection of social + onchain via Kiosk, a new Farcaster client which today is announcing a $10mm financing led by Electric Capital.

With our investment, Paragraph will accelerate product development and attract millions more creators worldwide to experience the new frontier that onchain publishing opens up.  We're doubling down on this mission, alongside our friends at Coinbase and Base, because we believe the creative internet is being rebuilt in a fundamentally better way on web3 rails. Unlocking direct ownership, incentive alignment, and permissionless innovation will empower a new generation of online creativity, expression and entrepreneurship. We can't wait to witness what the combined Paragraph/Mirror platform will unleash in the coming years.

(Note: you can collect this post right here on blog.usv.com, now powered by Paragraph)