Can Mirror be Robinhood 2.0?

Perhaps best known for mercilessly ripping kids off in exchange for their old video games, Gamestop has been in the video game business since 1984. However, even with high profit margins from arbitraging the hell out of inexperienced twelve year olds, like many brick and mortar retailers, GameStop was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy heading into 2021. Unsurprisingly, it attracted many short-sellers looking to bank in on its collapse. Little did short-sellers know, a swarm of smaller Reddit investors would make an epic stand against Wall Street’s hedge fund elites by squeezing the stock to record highs.

The volatility generated by these modern-day pirates caused the popular retail stock brokerage Robinhood and other online brokers to halt the trading of GameStop. This domino effect would cause worldwide uproar, as retail conspiracy theorists flooded social media with speculation that hedge funds such as Citadel ordered trading halts behind the scenes to save themselves.

The reality was much more complicated, and the real reason for the pause was related to Robinhood’s counterparties and the outdated two day settlement system for equities, and the poor market structure and regulation in the United States.

These unprecedented events exposed how prehistoric and censorship-prone our current equities trading infrastructure is, creating a golden opportunity for DeFi and synthetic asset protocols like Mirror.

The vision for Mirror is very similar to the mission laid out by Robinhood. At the core of the protocol is the pursuit of democratizing finance for people all over the world. Like trading applications that have shared similar goals before, Mirror aims to create a trading experience built around sleek, easy-to-use mobile apps with zero commission trading. To date, this line of thinking has been less common in crypto as most other crypto projects haven’t moved beyond building out core infrastructure, transactions, and fees. Mirror alternatively isn’t just thinking about its crypto competition. It has its eyes set on a bigger prize with co-founder Do Kwon stating, ”We are trying to compete against Robinhood, not just Synthetix.”