It’s no secret that the mainstream financial system for sex workers is discriminatory and broken. Payment processors such as Visa and Mastercard are getting increasingly stricter with the adult entertainment space as the stigma against sex workers continues to linger—as we all witnessed back in August, when OnlyFans suddenly announced they would be banning “sexually explicit adult content” from their platform, thereby putting millions of sex workers out of work, only to reverse course a month later after receiving extreme backlash.
They weren’t the first adult platform to fall victim to Visa and Mastercard’s dated demands. Pornhub made a similar announcement in 2020 when Visa suspended purchases on the platform temporarily following a skewed New York Times investigation, and just this month, AVN Stars and GayVN Stars announced they too would end “monetized content for creators” on their platform by Jan. 1, 2022, once again citing banking discrimination. The Free Speech Coalition (FSC), which advocates for the rights and freedoms of sex workers, responded in a statement: “Companies like Mastercard are now accomplices in the disenfranchisement of millions of sex workers, complicit in pushing workers away from independence into potentially more dangerous and exploitative conditions.”
OnlyFans, arguably the largest platform for user-generated adult content, has over 150 million users—and over 2 million of those are content creators. Many of their creators ran to platforms like Fansly and JustForFans after the OnlyFans announcement back in August. Creators may have found secondary and tertiary platforms to sell their content (for now), but what makes these platforms immune to falling victim to Visa and Mastercard down the road? The answer is simple: They’re not immune. They too answer to Visa and Mastercard just like OnlyFans, and it’s only a matter of time before all platforms accepting fiat as payment will find themselves “cancelled” or suspended from paying their adult entertainers on the platform. Where does that leave the creator? I’ll tell you: back to square one, with their businesses at the mercy of the banks.
As an adult entertainer myself and strong advocate for the sex work industry, I could not sit back and allow this to happen. I thought to myself: I’m going to be the face of this industry to find us a solution once and for all. I identified the problem—the banks—and the solution became very clear: get rid of the banks. It became obvious to me that what this industry needed was a cryptocurrency-powered adult entertainment platform. I am planning on investing $1 million into building my very own platform: WetSpace.
WetSpace is a crypto-based platform providing reliable payment processing for creators and the anonymity that is often desired by our fans. WetSpace provides the medium that will propel digital currencies into adult entertainment and revolutionize the community by creating an ecosystem for the NSFW industry. It is an agnostic platform that will integrate with crypto currencies that have the cheapest fees, fastest processing times, and are the most environmentally friendly.
It will be a place where creators will not need to worry about big banking restrictions and payouts, because when using cryptocurrencies, the payment is instant and goes directly into your crypto wallet (yes, that also means no chargebacks too). Not to mention, you’ll keep more of your money on WetSpace. Because I believe in this so much, we’ll have one of the lowest commission rates in the industry at only 15 percent.
So, my final message is to the creators, models and adult entertainers: What’s your solution to all this? Are you prepared to just hop around from platform to platform, hoping you can continue to grow your business there long-term without them shutting you down? Or are you ready to take your business to the next level by joining WetSpace, where we do not answer to the banks, we answer to you?