Boston nurse fired for nudes on OnlyFans launches crypto porn app – Cointelegraph Magazine
Former Boston ICU nurse Allie Rae made worldwide information in August final yr after she was fired for working a particularly naughty OnlyFans account on the facet. The story appeared in all places from the NY Post to CNN and The Daily Beast — and he or she even made an look on Dr. Phil.
The ensuing publicity noticed followers subscribing in droves, and the 37-year-old mom of three now makes greater than $200,000 a month.
But the identical type of moralizing and censorship that ended her nursing profession additionally threatens her newfound wealth from OnlyFans. Just six days after her story was made public, OnlyFans introduced it could ban “sexually explicit” content material, below strain from its banking companions.
“When the news broke about the payment processing and OnlyFans, I began looking at other platforms to switch to, and quickly realized they too could fall into the same trap down the road,” Rae says on the road from her new dwelling in crypto-friendly Florida.
“It was at that time that I figured out crypto was the answer.”
She’s assembled a crew of 20 builders and is placing the ending touches on a brand new OnlyFans-meets-Instagram-style crypto-powered social platform referred to as WetSpace. It’s resulting from launch in beta in February, accepting funds in a spread of stablecoins throughout totally different chains to mitigate points with fuel charges. NFT help will come within the venture’s second stage mid-year.
Porn has lengthy been seen as among the finest probabilities crypto has for adoption: Users can stay nameless, and performers don’t need to cope with fee processors charging them excessive charges or unilaterally reducing off companies below opaque morality clauses.
Despite this, as Magazine found up to now, crypto funds have didn’t take off. Pornhub tried and failed with Verge, then moved to utilizing Pumapay’s service, which was crippled by excessive fuel charges on Ethereum and is within the means of relaunching on Binance Smart Chain. SpankChain tried a extra modest platform focusing on crypto customers however has had restricted success to date, although it’s nonetheless within the recreation and is growing “SpankPay V2” based mostly on person suggestions. CumRocket is growing an NFT market however studies restricted availability of its CUMMIES token on exchanges.
Rae believes a significant downside is making an attempt to launch initiatives with associated grownup tokens. “I had been watching the fall of other ‘adult shitcoins’ and how their model was destined to fail serving two masters — creators and holders. That is when WetSpace came about.”
Rae factors out that grownup cash add an additional step to the method, and most are very risky, which isn’t enticing to customers or fashions.
“So I thought, ‘Well, we don’t need a coin, like, why go through all the drama of this coin? Of course, you’d get a lot of money up front, and it would definitely help fund your project. But luckily, I didn’t need to be concerned about the financial side of it because I had the money to put into it.”
How she acquired right here
The mom of three teenage sons, Rae is an unlikely pornstar-turned-crypto-entrepreneur. She joined the Navy at 17 and married her husband, Steven, the next yr (he typically stars in her movies). She then labored for 5 years in advertising and marketing, administration and actual property earlier than getting her dream job in nursing. “I was obsessed,” she says. “I was a straight-A nursing student. It was truly my passion and still is, it really is.”
Rae acquired a Masters in Nursing Education and specialised in neonatal intensive care, nursing sick infants again to well being. “Even though it was such a tragic time for so many families, there were also so many great moments,” she says. “I was a wonderful NICU nurse. Very, very good at my job.”
But bored at dwelling in the course of the pandemic, she began up an Instagram account, posting about hockey and craft beer. This attracted a faithful male following, a few of whom advised she begin an OnlyFans. When she learn information studies that the actress Bella Thorne had made $1 million on the platform in a single day, she determined to take their recommendation.
“I posted a few pictures, and I really actually had kind of fun with it. It was quite liberating, you know, at my age. And before you knew it, I had so many subscribers, and we were actually making good money on there.”
By the top of her first month, she’d made $6,900 — greater than the $6,500 she was paid as a nurse.
Unfortunately for Rae, not everyone seems to be a fan of OnlyFans, and a bunch of six of what she calls her “mean girl” colleagues, led by a pastor’s spouse, stumbled throughout her Instagram after which screenshotted her OnlyFans content material for administration.
News unfold like wildfire by way of the hospital, and that was “ultimately what, I think, drove management to have to act.”
“Their overall consensus was that it was now such a distraction on the unit, with everybody knowing, that if I was going to continue to do that, I couldn’t work there,” she provides.
“I wasn’t mentally ready to leave. I’ll tell you it was very difficult. There’s a lot of tears shed in that. But I think given how toxic the environment was and how judged I felt there — I wasn’t looked at the same — it was probably the right thing to do.”
Tailor-made for the media
Firing an ICU nurse in the course of a pandemic resulting from her porny OnlyFans account is an editor’s moist dream (not Magazine, in fact — we’re strictly concerned with the way forward for finance), and the story went viral. She went from making $35,000 a month from her facet hustle to $200,000 a month due to the publicity. Steven gave up his airline job to assist full time with the enterprise.
“Our success was just unbelievable, and so it became hard to not make it a priority,” she says.
“It’s crazy to go from being a suburban hockey mom/nurse to now I’m like this advocate for the sex industry. I mean, it’s very, very different.”
Porn funds
Part of that advocacy is making an attempt to determine a approach for creators and operators to flee the stranglehold that conventional fee processors have on it. In latest years, the conflict on grownup websites by fee processors has ramped up, supported by the emotive campaigns of anti-porn crusaders.
A living proof is the famed New York Times piece in December 2020 referred to as The Children of Pornhub. Columnist Nicholas Kristof sensationally claimed the “site is infested with rape videos. It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags.” He argued the positioning facilitated intercourse trafficking and cited a petition with 2.1 million signatures calling for it to be closed.
Often mistakenly known as an investigation, the NYT billed the piece as “opinion,” which means its ordinary requirements of fact-checking don’t apply. Mashable summed up the piece as being based mostly on the “dubious and distorted findings and arguments of one anti-sex work conservative group.” It induced a large backlash, and Mastercard and Visa shortly introduced they might not present companies to Pornhub, threatening the viability of the positioning.
The deplatforming of intercourse websites by fee corporations has ramped up significantly lately following the passing of the controversial Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (FOSTA-SESTA) in 2018.
Rae’s first encounter with the problem got here when OnlyFans induced outrage in August final yr by saying it could ban “sexually explicit” content material, threatening the livelihoods of two million creators making a collective $2.3 billion a yr. OnlyFans founder and CEO Tim Stokely blamed BNY Mellon, Metro Bank and JPMorgan Chase for refusing to course of funds, although the ban was shortly reversed after “banking partners’ assurances that OnlyFans can support all genres of creators.”
“A lot of people at that time were reaching out to me: ‘What do you think about this? Oh, my gosh, where are you going? You’re making so much money. Now where are you going to put your content?’” she recollects.
Rae explains that she’d thought-about different platforms however realized rivals “are at the mercy of the banks as well.”
“That’s when my brain really got to turn on to: What is the solution to this?” she says. “At that time, I didn’t fully understand the nature of what was going on. But I did a lot of research, and I started to really dive into the dark part of what’s going on in terms of the big financial institutions.”
“Porn is always looked at as taboo. There’s a stigma out there. But the amount of control that these banking industries have, over every platform that runs primarily on fiat, is scary.”
Counterpoint
She argues that OnlyFans provides creators a safer strategy to work within the intercourse business than in a strip membership or on the streets. And whereas she believes in taking agency motion towards intercourse trafficking and baby pornography, she says these goals are solely selectively pursued by fee processors.
A 2020 survey from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children revealed Facebook had 20.3 million reported incidents of kid sexual abuse supplies, Google had 546,704 incidents, Twitter had 65,062, Snapchat 144,095 and TikTok 22,692.
Way down the underside of the listing was Pornhub’s guardian firm, MindGeek, with 13,000.
“Facebook literally is the leader in child sex trafficking, and they’re definitely not shutting them down,” she says. “How much of it is in regards to them just truly wanting to get rid of the people in this industry (porn) and ban this type of content — is it really about child trafficking?”
“The banks are the issue across the board. And the only natural solution to that is, well, how do we get rid of the banks? Well, luckily, there’s decentralization, and there’s crypto.”
Crypto and the porn business
Rae had dabbled in crypto beforehand, making a bundle off of Dogecoin when Elon Musk’s tweets drove it to the moon and enjoying round with creating her personal NFTs when CumRocket launched its NSFW NFT market in mid-2021.
She says the anonymity of crypto is ideal for customers who wish to join however can’t afford to have an OnlyFans entry on their financial institution statements.
“I get DMs all the time saying ‘God, I wish I could join OnlyFans. But you know, I just can’t have my accountant seeing all the charges.’” There’s an enormous market that a variety of creators aren’t capable of faucet into.
The WetSpace interface will look so much like Instagram, with a feed, a discovery characteristic for creators and, afterward, a market enabling fashions to promote NFTs with added bonuses like free subscriptions, premium snaps or video chats. WetSpace will cost creators 15% (OnlyFans prices 20%), they usually can choose which cryptocurrencies to simply accept. They obtain the cash immediately and don’t have to fret about chargebacks.
Rae says it’s about 90% full proper now, with new options being added on a regular basis.
“We have a Discord that’s really poppin. Lots of creators saying, ‘Hey, are we gonna have this? Can we do this?’ And I’m like, ‘Yes, we’re gonna have so many great things.’ I think it’s going to be a fun place to be for the user and the creator. And I’m excited, and I hope it revolutionizes this entire industry.”
Yeah, however…
While there’s no doubting her ambitions, to date crypto funds in porn haven’t actually labored out. In early 2020, SpankChain performer and ambassador Allie Eve Knox defined why to Magazine:
“These are old dudes that are just trying to get off and then now they have to go through this whole thing of creating a wallet, saving a seed phrase, getting crypto, moving it into a wallet. […] It’s not just ‘I’m gonna go buy porn in 15 minutes and relieve myself’ process.”
Rae, nevertheless, believes instances have modified and that the tech is extra widespread and user-friendly than ever earlier than. She concedes the most important hurdle can be serving to noobs get began, however there can be step-by-step explainers and guides on tips on how to purchase crypto by way of a related Coinbase, MetaMask or Trust pockets.
“I want very, very clear clicks: like ‘sign up for your wallet here’ step-by-step because I do understand it is a learning curve. We are putting a lot of time and money into the educational side of this. Because it truly is really easy once you get going.”
“Crypto is in your face everywhere now. A couple of years ago, people would laugh at you if you talked about Bitcoin. People were like, ‘Oh, God, one of those Bitcoin people!’ And look at it now. It’s an actual currency. I think a lot of people who didn’t believe in it before are definitely starting to be like, ‘Okay, what is this all about?’ And they’re wanting to know more.”
“There’s no doubt in my mind: It will be a very, very big part of pornography, or any type of subscription base for adult content,” she says. “I don’t think it’s going away.”
