Paragraph

Paragraph is a Web3-native publishing and newsletter platform designed to equip creators with enhanced tools for community building and content monetization. The company was founded in 2021 by Colin Armstrong, a software engineer with a background at both Google and Coinbase. His experience in the tech and crypto spaces, coupled with a desire to address the limitations of existing Web2 publishing platforms like Substack, directly informed Paragraph's creation. Armstrong sought to provide creators with more control over their audience and content, moving beyond traditional ad-based revenue and paywalled subscription models.

The platform operates in the creator economy, serving a diverse client base that includes Web3 writers, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), NFT communities, and traditional journalists. Paragraph's business model centers on empowering creators to monetize their work through novel Web3 functionalities. This includes selling NFT-based memberships, which can gate exclusive content, and allowing readers to collect posts as digital assets. The company takes a 3% fee on memberships minted directly on the platform.

Paragraph distinguishes itself by integrating blockchain features directly into the publishing experience. Content can be permanently stored on decentralized networks like Arweave, ensuring it is censorship-resistant. The platform supports portable, on-chain social graphs, which means creators own the relationship with their audience, an asset they can take across different Web3 applications. Key features include wallet-to-wallet newsletters, token-gating for exclusive content, crypto payment options, and integrations with Web3 social protocols like Farcaster. These functionalities offer creators flexible monetization methods beyond recurring subscriptions, such as selling collectible editions of their work. For readers, it creates new ways to engage with and show support for their favorite creators by owning a piece of their content.

The company has achieved significant milestones, starting with a $1.7 million pre-seed funding round in October 2022, led by Lemniscap with participation from Binance Labs and FTX Ventures. This was followed by a major development in May 2024, when Paragraph raised $5 million in a round led by Union Square Ventures and Coinbase Ventures. Concurrently, Paragraph announced it was taking over Mirror, another prominent Web3 blogging platform, with Paragraph's founder Colin Armstrong continuing as CEO and Mirror's founder Denis Nazarov staying on as an advisor. This strategic move consolidated two of the leading players in the onchain publishing space, positioning Paragraph to accelerate its mission.

Keywords: onchain publishing, web3 newsletter, creator monetization, NFT memberships, decentralized content, crypto payments, Colin Armstrong, creator economy, DAOs, token-gating, Arweave, Farcaster integration, Mirror xyz, digital collectibles, web3 media, blockchain publishing, community building, direct audience relationship, content ownership, decentralized storage