 a kinky habit you wouldn't like your bank to know about, tired of the big transaction fees on your favorite adult website, or maybe you are struggling in setting up your online sex toys shop because of payment service restrictions, well, cryptocurrencies can help you out. Anonymous, decentralized, untraceable. These are the features making crypto a natural match for the adult entertainment industry. The adult industry has been always playing a pioneer role in the adoption of new technology. From the VHS boom in the 80s, VHS, to the advent of virtual reality. And now it's blockchain's turn. Whether we are talking about porn sites, webcam sites, escorting sites, or adult online shops, all these businesses have been sharing a complicated relation with financial institutions. Traditional payment services like Visa and MasterCard consider the adult industry a high-risk environment because of the legal gray zone which it often operates, and the high amount of disputed transactions happening on adult websites. That is why adult sites are charged with high transaction fees, ranging from 5% to 15% to process payments, and at times, they are outright denied these services. Visa or MasterCard treats us as a very risky industry, in part because somebody will buy something and then decide that they don't want it on their credit card or they didn't really want to pay for it. They buy it in the moment and then they regret it and they say, why don't want to pay for this? Or they see a statement on their bill that says some company that they don't understand because it's a billing company and so they do what are called charge backs. And those charge backs raise the fee for everybody. And so the fees are substantially higher with adult content than they are with something like Amazon or a grocery store or something like that. Consumers of adult content can also benefit from the pseudo anonymity of crypto, which allows them to make purchases while avoiding potentially awkward bank statements. What crypto allows is that the transaction does not go through the bank. It's a direct transaction. You cannot reverse it. And so you don't have to deal with the fees that are passed on by the billing companies and the credit card processors. You can do a direct transaction and it can lower the fee for everybody. People who use crypto tend to spend a lot more. So the average buy for somebody who is using crypto to pay for something like a private chat with a live cam model on Xamster Live is going to spend between $150 and $200, which is significantly more than what they might spend if they were using a credit card. Having noticed the synergy of crypto and adult entertainment, a number of crypto projects started developing at the intersection of the two industries. Reuben Kappa is the CEO of Intimate, a blockchain startup which aims to disrupt the adult entertainment industry. He believes that by denying their services to adult entertainment businesses, financial institutions are illegitimately imposing their moral standards on customers and merchants. And a lot of that's just institutional bias. It's down to sometimes what they call morality clauses in the banks or in the card schemes. We've met with a lot of venture capital firms, angel investors, crypto funds, and eventually most of them just have a mandate that's, sorry, we can't touch a bunch of things, often gambling, often adult. They just have their mandate within their fund of what they can and can't do, which is largely driven by more traditional investors. Who are banks to be the moral arbiters of what we can and can't do? Intimate is first and foremost a crypto payment gateway designed for adult industry businesses. It offers both merchants and consumers a cheaper alternative to traditional credit card payments. The platform supports its native coin plus a number of other popular cryptocurrencies. Several adult websites have already partnered with Intimate. Among them, SmileMakers is a retail company selling sex toys and lubricants whose mission is normalizing the perception of female sexuality by bringing it fully into the open. That is why SmileMakers' items cannot be found in sex shops, but only in health and beauty stores. We want to make buying a vibrator as normal as buying a toothbrush or buying a tampon. It should be very commonplace. And also just a normal necessity. Even though our mission is to be very open and very public about talking about sexual health, we are aware there are people who are still very private about that and would feel shy about buying a vibrator in a drugstore or a department store. And so that's why we wanted to be respective of people's privacy and allow there to be crypto payments on our website. There are these women who really believe in sexual empowerment, but also financial independence. And that's why they're using crypto to buy a vibrator. And many of them are buying a vibrator as the first time their first crypto purchase. Even regular sex workers have embraced crypto, given its potential to lessen their dependency from banks, which often frees and block their accounts without warning. A solution to these problems is provided by Ginger, a Switzerland-based blockchain platform that provides an end-to-end booking service for sex workers. The platform aims to build an ecosystem in which sex workers and their customers can interact in a secure and confidential way while bypassing middlemen. In the past, I ran into many issues to find and book a woman of my choice for a paid date. Issues which can be easy avoid with today's technology. Besides, the client's experience is mostly moderate. Also, the service providers face many problems in the sector. This was the point when I created the concept for the Instafog feature. The feature where you simply open an app on your smartphone and book your favorite person with only a few clicks. All of this in a secure and verified environment. For me, that was a revolutionizing idea to follow up on. I was instantly hyped of the potential of the market. Still, I'm fully convinced to provide a fair and transparent solution for service providers in the prostitution industry. With the introduction of blockchain technology, the launch of our own payment currency, GGC, and the business development, in the past years, we finally have reached matroness to achieve impact. The official currency of the Ginger ecosystem, GGcoin, will be used to close the remaining gaps in the business model and provide an alternative solution for payments all around the globe. The nature of the market is inviting to issue a cryptocurrency to be able to offer worldwide payments without being dependent to mostly conservative banks and institutions. Besides this, we can make use of technical features as smart contracts for escrow, transparent distribution of commission, earnings, and refunds. But I guess most important for the clients is that there is no invoice for bookings. Also, our user base is verified. The client acts anonymously with the application without being tracked in the real world. Buying and selling sex online became particularly difficult in the US when in last March, the anti-sex trafficking FOSTA-SESTA bill package came into force. Since then, adult internet services became liable for the content that users post on their sites and therefore are easy targets for lawsuits for promoting online sex trafficking. Many in the adult industry claim that the FOSTA-SESTA was in fact an attack on free speech. As a consequence of the new legislation, the ad website backpage.com, also known as the world's biggest online brothel, was shut down by the FBI. There was a big struggle after FOSTA and SESTA bills were passed here in the US. The industry changed, where no longer allowed to use Skype. The terms of service have changed on that. A lot of the payment apps were also not allowed to use. And that was the biggest problem. Shortly after the new regulation came into force, River Sunshine started performing on Spank Chain, an Ethereum-based payment platform, allowing camp performers to bypass middlemen when receiving payments, thus increasing revenues and control over their savings. And then actually it changed my life completely. The site keeps only 5%, which that's a major thing for us performers. All the other sites take at least 50%. I'm still fairly new, there's still things that I'm not completely familiar with. After raising $6 million in an ICO in 2017, Spank Chain recently launched a native dollar pegged, stablecoin called Booty, which can be used to tip performers on the Spank Chain campsite. Performers on the site claimed to earn much more in Spank Chain than on traditional campsites. In the first six months since the launch of the platform, 31 performers allegedly received over $70,000 in tips. The average person probably tips 10 to 20 Booty, which would be 10 to $20 equivalent in fiat. I've noticed the traffic fluctuates as the price of crypto changes as well too. When it drops, there's less traffic. But when it goes up, there's way more traffic. I am still making more through crypto than I am on the other sites and I don't use them as much anymore. Given the small fees charged to the performers, Spank Chain plans to sustain itself in the long term by selling its crypto payment system to other adult sites. Amin Solimani, CEO at Spank Chain, envisions a future when individual performers will adopt Booty as a payment system on their personal campsites. When all of the performers have an Ethereum address or a Bitcoin address listed on their Twitter profile that links to an account that they control, then people will be able to pay them without any middleman and intermediary. And that's what everybody's gonna start competing against. So I think it's gonna be a grassroots sort of bottom-up movement. A major breakthrough seemed to happen last year when the world's most popular porn website, Pornhub, started accepting crypto payments with Verge, an anonymity-focused token. Back then, Litecoin CEO Charlie Lee welcomed the opening of the porn industry to crypto and a number of other porn sites have been following Pornhub's examples since then. The future had finally come. However, cryptocurrencies are still far from reaching mass adoption in the adult industry. As of 2018, only 470 adult websites, 50 webcam platforms and 35 sex shops all around the world accept crypto, which is a tiny figure compared to the multi-billion dollar size of the industry. Consumers are apathetic and lazy in general. And if I can tap my credit card to pay in most of the world, then I don't really want to go through the somewhat difficult process of acquiring crypto, understanding, managing my own keys, understanding confirmation times. There's this whole educational barrier, right, where you have to learn what this is, get an exchange account. There's a lot of stuff to figure out. And then eventually you're like, oh, you know what? I don't want to get paid in something that fluctuates. What you see in adult is that we will get it to a certain level and then you'll see other mainstream companies start adding it as well. And then it will sort of explode for all of us. It was very scary at first. It crypto, big bad crypto seems like, oh, I don't know about this. So it's a maze. And once you go through that maze once or twice, you know how to do it. It's really not that scary. The adult industry proved itself to be an excellent training ground for crypto. Even though the high volatility affecting digital currencies and the lack of knowledge of blockchain technology is still preventing it to reach mass scale adoption. However, crypto adoption is a slow but steady process. And it seems just a matter of time until it will spark a revolution in the adult industry.