Adult Industry Creators Turn to Crypto to Fight Financial Discrimination and Censorship
Crypto and the adult film industry have a lot in common — like being shut off from banks — but they are finding ways of working together to solve mutual problems
This is part of Decential’s web3 and blockchain coverage celebrating Pride Month
The unbanked and underbanked are most often thought about in terms of geography – whole swaths of Africa for example. The same holds for countries that face exorbitant inflation such as Venezuela where costs are rising at an estimated rate of about 400%.
Yet some pockets of the U.S. economy are being barricaded from banking services – legitimate tax-paying industries that are hung out to dry because the powers that be simply don’t like their business. The adult industry is one example, and one that queer people naturally gravitate towards.
WetSpace, an adult content platform powered by crypto, was launched as a reaction to discrimination within TradFi and OnlyFans. Allie Rae, a nurse who was moonlighting as an OnlyFans creator, left her medical career once she was bringing in around $370,000 per month. Then OnlyFans suddenly warned they’d remove porn content. Rae was left wondering why they’d ban a multibillion-dollar part of their business.
“I learned about the background with JP Morgan Chase, Visa, Mastercard and the banking industry, and how they were regulating the content,” Rae said to me in a recent interview. “They were telling OnlyFans if they didn’t remove the content, they’d lose their funding, and they wouldn’t go public.”
Crypto and the adult industry have a lot in common. Both aim to liberate individuals, democratize financial opportunity, combat censorship and celebrate inclusivity. And both have been discriminated against by banks as they fight for ways to get fiat currency like U.S. dollars into and out of their ecosystems.
As Rae was creating WetSpace she didn’t want to go down the token path and further complicate things by creating a coin, overpromising and under delivering, and having to “serve two masters,” the creators and investors.
Allie Rae
“We wanted to implement a platform where people could use whatever currency they wanted, as long as we had a smart contract for it,” she said.
So Rae kept creators and fans in mind, having seen the discrimination on both sides of the screen. Fans wanted anonymity and for transactions to not show up on their bank statements where banks, wives and CPAs could see the activity.
WetSpace has since fought to include credit card payments into the platform. A creator can now choose to accept crypto, which immediately goes to their wallet via the smart contract (minus the 15 percent which goes to the WetSpace wallet). If a fan paid with U.S. dollars. the creator gets paid out every week, just like OnlyFans.
“This is people’s livelihoods and making money online is a much safer way of doing sex work, compared to standing on the corner and taking cash,” Rae said. “We are also incredibly inclusive. The LGBTQ+ and fetish communities tend to gravitate towards us because we’re more lenient with the types of content we can use. A lot of websites don’t let you have bondage, for example. It’s our goal to have that diversity, so much so that we’ve implemented features that support that,” she said.
Pairing a subscription and marketplace
Sex-positive NFT subscription platform, MintStars, is tackling banking discrimination a different way – helping creators earn more from their content over time and prevent it from being pirated.
“We make all of the content into NFTs. Fans subscribe to a creator to receive their content as NFTs and they can resell it on the marketplace to other fans with the creator earning royalties,” said MintStars Co-founder Jessica Van Meir.
Van Meir and her co-founder saw pirated content as a big issue in the OnlyFans world and thought if fans are going to continue sharing content, the creator should make money too. “We figured that if the fan can resell it legitimately and now have a vested interest in the content, they’re less likely to pirate it because that would be devaluing an asset they own,” she said.
The inspiration for MintStars can be traced back to Van Meir’s research career which started as an undergraduate at Duke University where she explored sex trafficking, prostitution, and worker’s rights. This led to her work at a feminist law firm, representing victims of sexual harassment and non-consensual pornography. Van Meir became interested in the online space and the rights of sex workers, particularly now with OnlyFans using AI tools to mass moderate and shut down accounts.
“We’ve seen that sex workers have been one of the groups that’s been quickest to adopt cryptocurrency technology because they’ve had to out of necessity,” Van Meir said. “It’s really important to us to be queer friendly, especially for trans people, who have been discriminated against on other platforms. We wanted to create a platform where people feel safe to express themselves and use their bodies in whatever way they want.”
Last month, MintStars joined SpankChain – the “OG adult platform in the space” and the Free Speech Coalition in DC to lobby Congress on banking discrimination. SpankChain, a MintStars investor, is supporting their expansion after its pay service was shut down after Wyre changed owners and started working with a new payment processor, checkout.com, which discriminates against adult businesses.
The groups were pleasantly surprised in DC, with positive receptions on almost every meeting they had on both sides of the aisle. “People really understood why this banking issue is a problem, and for the most part, weren’t aware the issue existed," Van Meir said.
“On the Republican side, they’re concerned about banking discrimination because businesses in the oil and gas industries have had their accounts shut down,” she said. “They have a bill called the Fair Access to Banking Act, which if passed, would help the adult industry because it would make it illegal for banks to discriminate against legal businesses based on not liking them. However, the bill isn’t going to pass because it doesn’t have Democratic support because of how it’s billed as an oil and gas industry bill.”
Van Meir said the Democrats understand how this is hurting workers, especially the most marginalized groups of sex workers, making them more vulnerable to intimate partner abuse or exploitation by a third party. The next step, Van Meir said, is getting to the bottom of why banks are doing this and identify what federal regulators are telling them.
Operation Choke Point – crypto provides oxygen to adult industry
The entire crypto space can sympathize with the frustrations of sex workers as it’s marginalized in comparison to the mainstream. Bridges between crypto and banking services are needed more than ever, paired with regulation that doesn’t overreach and halt progress.
Van Meir said she’d like to see more of a focus in the blockchain space on how we actually use this technology to solve real problems, not just for capitalistic purposes. “There’s a lot of infrastructure plays, which are obviously important, but I don’t see as many efforts to use the technology in ways that will really change the world for the better,” she said.
The most underrepresented, marginalized groups are a good place to start.