According to a report from Cointelegraph, Patreon creators were met with issues getting paid this past August, while OnlyFans content creators have been faced with threats of bans due to adult content not being fully embraced by the platform. These occurrences have adult content creators looking to Web3 as a means to stay relevant and self-sufficient.
Adult content creators have been seeking a way to take greater control of their destinies in the world of independent adult entertainment. The shift toward decentralized alternatives to OnlyFans and Patreon seems to be the running theme after payment difficulties and threats of being de-platformed have arisen on the centralized sites.
Leon Lee, founder and CEO of Only1 — a decentralized version of OnlyFans — tells Cointelegraph there has recently been a shift in power from middle-men to content creators, due to Web3.
“The role of intermediaries are diminishing while the role and earnings of creators are increasing,” said Lee.
In August, content creators on Patreon complained of difficulties accessing their income from the platform as payments were being flagged as fraudulent by their financial institutions.
In 2021 content creators were threatened with their content being banned if it fell under “sexually explicit”. Though the decision was reversed within days, it still gave adult content creators a glimpse of how vulnerable their livelihood is on centralized platforms opposed to Web3.
In reference to this, Lee contends that content creators will always be in the shadows of being deplatformed as long as they continue to utilize centralized platforms that use traditional payment rails.
“Creators are still at risk of being deplatformed and are not realizing their full earning potential.”
Only1 was launched on the Solana blockchain in March 2023 — backed by Animoca Brands. Nonetheless, the platform is one out of many startups seeking to snare the allure of adult subscription platforms with a decentralized crypto spin.
In 2022, OnlyFans model Allie Rae launched a crypto-powered adult content platform, WetSpace, as an alternative to OnlyFans.
Rae told Cointelegraph in December 2022 that she developed the platform to evade the payment scrutiny that creators on platforms like OnlyFans were receiving from banks:
“I started to figure out that the banks really were largely, in part, the driving force behind some of those decisions that platforms were having to make. And so that naturally led to: How do you get rid of the banks? And crypto came out like a knight in shining armor.”
More recently, creators on OnlyFans began heading to Friend.tech, a new decentralized social media platform constructed on Coinbase’s layer-2 network Base.
Lee believes a mass exodus will take place when more content creators confront the fact they are no longer willing to be censored at the expense of their craft and livelihood.
“Creators are already waking up to the fact and are becoming less dependent on intermediaries to monetize,” Lee said.
He acknowledged that TV producers, advertisers, and brands will continue to control a market share in the creator economy but stated that a true peer-to-peer payment infrastructure like blockchain is the “next logical step” for creators:
“By removing the dependency on traditional payment processors, a Web3 platform and its community can have full autonomy over the types of content allowed,” he said, adding:
"Since the OnlyFans adult content censorship, creators have been creating ‘backup accounts’ on different platforms due to such deplatform risk.”
Proof of Peach, SEXN and Keyhole are three other adult entertainment platforms operating in the Web3 space.
Lee is convinced that more creators will eventually swarm to decentralized platforms that offer them “full autonomy” over their content and full ownership rights to the money they yield:
“It is an inevitable future where there will no longer be any intermediaries between fans and creators — this is an obvious but unrealized potential of blockchain technology.”
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