What is MIX?

We now live in a world where almost all content online is published via an intermediary, such as Medium, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Google, GitHub, Instagram, YouTube.

These platforms provide a lot of value, but they are not consistent with the concepts that made the web go viral in the first place:

freedom to publish (anyone can run their own web server)
freedom to consume (everyone can visit any website with their web browser)

The censorship of popular social media platforms started with demonetization and shadow-banning, but now popular accounts are being removed completely.

The purpose of MIX is to be an open-source publication platform that has all the advantages that modern centralized platforms have, and also to revive the disintermediation property of the web that has been lost.

Every developer who uses popular social networking platforms feels the pain of not being able to innovate. Sure, these platforms have APIs, but they are increasingly limited. With the web, every developer was a first class citizen. MIX aims to bring this concept to social publishing.

As demonstrated by Steemit, decentralized social networking is likely to be the first use of blockchain technology that really goes mainstream.

How Does MIX Work?

MIX utilizes two main decentralized technologies: Ethereum and IPFS.

MIX is an independent Ethereum blockchain. This has a number of advantages:

Extended scalability runway – MIX is an on-chain publication system. It needs really cheap transactions. This is simply not possible on Ethereum at present. MIX has the entire capacity of Ethereum for itself, resulting in transaction fees being a millionth of a cent. Other high capacity blockchain technologies were considered, such as EOS, but these were discounted due to much weaker guarantees.
Ability to hard fork – If there is a critical bug in one of the core MIX smart contracts, it will be possible for the MIX community to perform a hard fork to fix the problem. If the core MIX smart contracts were deployed on a shared blockchain like Ethereum or Ethereum Classic, this would be impossible.
Blockchain customization – In future, the MIX team will be able to hard fork the MIX blockchain to make it better suited for its specific use case.
Native token – MIX has a 2,000 day crowdfunding smart contract.

You can learn more about MIX in this introductory video:

MIX Roadmap

MIX Blockchain was activated on April 27, 2017. MIX will have an upcoming hard fork to Byzantium to defuse the difficulty bomb.

Now the major smart contracts are stable and the browser app is approaching minimum viable product. It should be out by the end of 2018. In addition to being the primary means of interacting with MIX, the MIX browser is a reference application for other developers to use as a blueprint for creating their own apps.

A major feature to be added in 2019 is video publishing.

MIX also plans to join the Polkadot network for cross-chain communication and trading.

How to Buy MIX

At the time of writing, MIX has a market cap of about $39,000, with about 39.5 million MIX in circulation. The MIX token is available for trading on Graviex and C-CEX.

How to Store MIX

MIX can be stored with Coinomi. It will soon be possible to store MIX on your Ledger.

You can learn more about MIX on our website, Medium and YouTube, and keep up with updates on Twitter and Discord.

Contributed by Jonathan Brown

Jonathan Brown is the founder of MIX Blockchain. Before transitioning to blockchain technology he spent ten years in the Drupal CMS community. He is fan advocate for rfeedom of speech and personal empowerment.