Mirror User Guide

Published in

Mirror Protocol

7 min readDec 3, 2020

Background

The DeFi boom has given us a number of applications built on top of the Ethereum network and an unappetizing variety of food tokens of questionable intent. While we appreciate the abundance of gastronomical options, what we truly crave is substance — something built on real world value. To that end, we introduce Mirror — a DeFi protocol that enables Mirrored Assets (mAssets): synthetic assets that give traders price exposure to real-world assets by reflecting their price activity on-chain.

We take the best that DeFi has to offer and pair it with real-world asset exposure on an interface accessible on both the Terra and Ethereum blockchains. Moreover, mAssets offer many tangible advantages over traditional assets: you can hold them in fractional amounts and trade them unrestrained by geographic location or US stock market hours. You can benefit from exposure to the asset without the burden of owning the asset.

Value Proposition

Fair access to popular assets is limited to a few. Synthetic assets provide exposure to an asset without holding the underlying resource. This has a range of advantages, including expanding global accessibility to foreign markets, reducing the friction when switching between different assets (e.g. from Apple shares to synthetic gold), and enabling speedy order execution.

Global Accessibility: In most markets outside of Europe & North America, access to foreign equities and forex markets is highly limited. Crypto allows global accessibility without entry barriers.
Fractional Orders: In traditional finance, to execute a fractional order, multiple fractional orders are bundled together to execute a unitary transaction. The process of gathering all the orders into one requires additional waiting time. By utilizing the blockchain, orders volume is simply represented as a number on the blockchain, so there is no need for the intermediary bundling process.
Nearly-Instantaneous Order Execution: Oftentimes due to the lack of liquidity (price-time-priority order book algorithm), orders can take up to a day to fully execute. Given the fact that Mirror relies on liquidity provided by each individual asset pool, orders can be executed as fast as the blocktime of the network (~ 6 seconds).

Protocol Design

Anyone can issue and trade assets fully collateralized in Terra stablecoins and mAssets, tracking the price of everything from traditional equities to cryptocurrencies.

To create an mAsset, you must lock up 150% of the current asset value in UST or other mAssets as collateral. This regulates minting, as collateral can be liquidated if positions go under the minimum collateral ratio.
To redeem an mAsset and receive the collateral, you must burn the same amount of mAssets issued when opening the CDP.
To trade an mAsset, the assets are listed on AMM DEX Terraswap. Trading fees (0.3%) and MIR also serve to incentivize liquidity providers to trade.
To ensure that the mAsset is pegged to the real asset, the system uses a decentralized price oracle that is updated every 30 seconds. When the price of the mAsset drifts, traders are incentivized to arbitrage to claim the collateral.

Detailed mechanism documentation can be found at https://docs.mirror.finance.

The MIR token

The Mirror token (MIR) is Mirror Protocol’s fairly distributed governance token. The MIR token has two main features:

Captures CDP closure fees: When Mirror CDPs are closed, a 1.5% fee is charged on the collateral. The fees are aggregated daily and used to purchase MIR tokens on Terraswap, which is in turn paid to MIR stakers.
Protocol governance: The Mirror token can be used to change major parameters in the protocol, such as the trading fee take rate and the position fee. It can also be used to make spend proposals against the on-chain community pool holding MIR tokens, which can be used to fund developer grants and add incentives to the protocol.

MIR Distribution

At genesis, a total of 18.3 million MIR will be airdropped to LUNA stakers and UNI holders as a reward to those who not only actively uphold the stability of the Terra and DeFi ecosystems at present, but also believe in their success and rising significance. Based on screenshots taken on 11/23/2020 03:36AM UTC, each user with LUNA staked will receive MIR on a pro-rata basis and each UNI holder with at least 100 UNI will receive 220 MIR.

Additionally, in order to align the growth of the Mirror Protocol with the network security of the base layer, Terra, over the course of the first year 18.3 million MIR tokens will be distributed to LUNA stakers on a weekly basis (every 100,000 blocks). For a more detailed distribution breakdown, see the the MIR distribution schedule .

With no Mirror token pre-mine, users can farm Mirror tokens by providing liquidity on Uniswap on Ethereum and equivalent pairs on Terraswap on Terra, similarly to how yield farming programs work on Uniswap. Liquidity providers are rewarded generously over the course of four years, with rewards decaying by 50% until the end of year four.

Governance

While the Mirror protocol is developed by Terraform Labs (TFL), TFL abdicates control to the decentralized DeFi community from the onset. TFL has no intention of keeping or selling any MIR tokens for profit so that governance privileges and potential rewards are entirely in the community’s hands. There are no admin keys with privileged access. All changes, such as new features to be added to Mirror Protocol, must be enacted via community governance. Passing a governance proposal requires a majority approval of Mirror token holders, and takes 1 week(s) to take effect.

More specifically, MIR holders receive the following governance rights:

Ability to set important economic parameters
Ability to vote on budget proposals from the community pool
(i.e. decide how the X% token distribution that goes to the pool can be spent)
Vote in / vote out assets to be covered by the protocol

Initial mAssets

Mirror can create new mAssets that track the price of any asset via onchain governance. To get the ball rolling here, we’ve selected the initial pool of assets based on the following criteria: popularity, provision of both long and short positions, and broad coverage (blue chip, commodities, ETFs, etc).

At genesis, the following assets will be covered:

Stocks

mAAPL — Mirrored Apple Inc.
mAMZN — Mirrored Amazon.com, Inc.
mBABA — Mirrored Alibaba Group Holding Limited
mGOOGL — Mirrored Alphabet Inc.
mMSFT — Mirrored Microsoft Corporation
mNFLX — Mirrored Netflix, Inc.
mTSLA — Mirrored Tesla, Inc.
mTWTR — Mirrored Twitter Inc.

ETFs

mIAU — Mirrored iShares Gold Trust
mQQQ — Mirrored Invesco QQQ Trust
mSLV — Mirrored iShares Silver Trust
mUSO — Mirrored United States Oil Fund, LP
mVIXY — Mirrored ProShares VIX Short-Term Futures ETF

Native Token

MIR — Mirror Governance Token

Mirror Interface Guide

Designed with interchain operability in mind, Mirror can be accessed on Mirror Web App and mETH, with a few key differences between the two. For a frictionless user experience, all tokens on Mirror and mETH are easily transferrable between each other through the interchain Shuttle bridge, which enables cross-chain transfers between Terra and Ethereum. This means that any asset bought or minted on Mirror can be sent to Ethereum and be traded on Uniswap, and vice versa.

Mirror Web App

To use Mirror Web App, install Terra Station Extension on Google Chrome.
To send tokens, choose the Send option on the Holdings list on My Page, input the recipients Terra/Ethereum address, choose the token type and amount, and confirm.
To trade mAssets/MIR tokens against UST, confirm which mAsset you want to buy or sell.
To mint new tokens of an mAsset and open a new CDP, select another mAsset or UST to be used as collateral, determine the collateral ratio, and confirm. Manage an open CDP on My Page.
To provide liquidity, supply an equal value of an asset and UST on the Pool page.
Receive LP tokens that allow you to reclaim your share of the pool.
To withdraw liquidity, reclaim your assets by burning LP tokens on the Pool page.
To stake / unstake LP tokens, select the corresponding staking pool on the Stake page, and determine the amount to stake / unstake.
To claim staking rewards, select CLAIM ALL REWARDS on the Stake page and confirm the amount.
To claim rewards from an individual staking position, select CLAIM REWARDS on My Page for respective position.
To participate in governance, first stake MIR tokens on the Governance page.
To create a poll, first deposit 100 MIR to prevent spam polls. Then, select the type of poll you want to create, and submit the transaction.
To vote on a poll, select a poll that is in progress, vote, and submit the transaction.

mETH

To use mETH on Uniswap via Shuttle, install MetaMask.
To stake / unstake LP tokens, select the corresponding staking pool on the Stake page, and determine the amount to stake / unstake.
To claim staking rewards, select CLAIM ALL REWARDS on the Stake page and confirm the amount.

Security Audit

We consider the security of the Mirror protocol extremely important. Our development team has worked with the Cyber Unit team and third-party consultants to create a safe and trustworthy protocol. See the Mirror Smart Contract audit here. All contract code and balances can be publicly verified. If you discover an original vulnerability, refer to our Bug Bounty guidelines and let us know at security@mirror.finance. We promise to reward you generously depending on the severity of the discovery, granted that it fulfills our requirements.

Smart Contracts

Mirror smart contracts are available on https://github.com/mirror-protocol. The following is a list of smart contracts deployed on Mirror with a brief explanation:

Collector: Collect protocol fees from CDP withdrawals and liquidations and send to Gov
Community: Manage the Community Pool fund
Factory: Organize all other contracts on Mirror
Gov: Allow decentralized governance to control other Mirror contracts. Share MIR with MIR stakers
Mint: Handle CDP creation, management, and liquidation
Oracle: Enable oracle feeders to post prices for mAssets
Staking: Distribute MIR rewards from block reward to LP stakers

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