I believe that the future of only fans is on the blockchain. To be specific I’m predicting that models and sex workers will embrace crypto and spin up their NFTs and DAOs.
To understand why we have to rewind a bit, it was the 1980s when the internet was born, back then it was mainly used by the government and academia. However, a surprising early adopter was the adult entertainment industry.
Danni Ashe was a stripper who wanted to make her own website. Back in the 90s, there weren’t a lot of programmers, so she had to learn HTML and code it herself. When it launched, it took off like wildfire, demand for erotic photos was so high that it crashed her internet provider servers. She even pioneered the eCommerce subscription model by charging a recurring fee to access her site.
If you think about it, the adult entertainment industry has always been at the forefront of technological adoption. They got into the internet, video streaming, and virtual reality way before the mainstream masses did. However, there was a problem, the finance industry was never really keen on serving them. Their banks, and credit card companies, you name it, would often freeze their accounts and leave them stranded.
That’s why sex workers were some of the earliest adopters of Bitcoin, they saw it as a way to get paid while the gatekeepers of traditional finance shut them out. Some of the earliest Bitcoin millionaires were sex workers because of this. They got paid in bitcoin and they decided to huddle some, too. When Bitcoin rocketed, they became rich.
In the 2010s, the internet had found true mass adoption, People went online to shop, read the news, and connect with their friends, but demand for adult content continued to dominate. Some reports said that up to 30% of all internet traffic was porn related.
Unfortunately, things were far from perfect for this industry. Profits largely flowed to a few production studios and porn conglomerates; famous porn stars would get millions of views on their videos but receive a tiny payout in return. Their fans also crave something more personalized and intimate. They wanted to support their favorite stars directly instead of enriching the website owners.
In 2016, OnlyFans was launched by two brothers in London, this is a website where you can post photos and videos, and your fans have to pay a subscription fee in order to see them. It was actually created as a general-purpose website for all sorts of creators, but it really hit a pain point for sex workers because they signed up in droves, their usage generated two billion dollars for OnlyFans in 2020, and now they have over 1 million creators with close to 200 million registered users on their platform.
Besides these impressive numbers, OnlyFans has also become a household name. We see their models all over social media flaunting their Lambos and other luxury items, some of them make six figures per month from OnlyFans.
But there’s a problem. When you look at the numbers, only a small minority of models are making that much, everyone else is pulling in a few thousand dollars here and there. That’s definitely not enough to support them as full-time creators. This phenomenon is called the power law and it means the vast majority of the money earned is by a small group of creators.
Unfortunately, we’re never going to escape the power law, but I think blockchain technology can help with this situation. I think a mixture of NFTs and DAOs can empower creators even more than existing options.
We saw the very first example of these new NFT endow structures in early 2022. Irene Zhao, an e-girl with quite the following in the crypto world has some telegram stickers made from her photos. One of her followers had the brilliant idea of turning those stickers into NFTs and building a DAO around her loyal fans. They talked, she agreed, and IreneDAO was born.
The structure of her DAO is quite simple, to join you have to buy one of her NFTs, then you can enter their discord server and chat with the rest of her fans. Together NFT holders can vote on how to spend the treasury that the DAO controls. They could give some to Irene, give some to charity, whatever they want really. And every time their NFTs are traded on OpenSea, the treasury gets a cut of the trade, but I think the biggest reason IreneDAO grew so much is that they leaned into this whole SIMPing megatrend.
Instead of beating around the bush, they embraced the fact that she was the e-girl, and they were her loyal SIMPs. Their motto was simplicity, integrity, meaning, and purpose; or S-I-M-P. This joking yet serious approach really resonated with the masses, which helped IreneDAO spread like wildfire. Within the first few days of her launch, her NFTs did millions in volume, it got so popular that even Logan Paul and Mike Novogratz bought some.
Their meteoric success inspired many copycats to hit the scene, such as EllaDao, MarenDAO, and EuniDAO, just to name a few. But I think there’s a lot more to the story here than just people trolling or gambling, I think these SIMP DAO offer unique advantages for both the e-girls and their SIMPs.
First of all, the e-girl doesn’t even need to build anything herself. She can just call on her fans to do all the technical stuff like set up her NFTs or DAOs. She just needs to set the vision and sign off on what’s created. But what’s in it for the SIMP to do all this though? There are two big reasons. First, he gets recognition and appreciation from his favorite e-girl, even better than that he gets financially rewarded as well.
The SIMP made the collection, so he’d get some of the NFTs early on. If everything goes well, the price goes up and he’ll make some fat gains, too. The e-girl does have to assign value to her NFTs in order for this whole thing to work, but she has a lot of incentive to take that seriously because if demand increases for NFTs, then the ones that she owns are worth more, and she gets royalties from future sales.
The benefits that she assigns to her NFTs don’t even need to be sexual either, it could be like you get to play video games with her, or she’ll facetime call you every so often, or maybe she’ll add you to her Snapchat close friends list, just some ideas that could be possible.
This whole arrangement becomes a business relationship between the e-girl and her SIMPs. It’s way more of a two-way street than how OnlyFans is set up. In the OnlyFans world, the model creates, and the fan consumes, that’s pretty much it. There’s no incentive for them to work together to grow it into something bigger. Think about it, the fans don’t necessarily care if their favorite creators get super popular or not.
However, in this new SIMP DAO approach, they have all the incentive to help spread the word and build stuff for their favorite e-girl, because by doing this, they get recognition and profits, two things they really want. That’s why I believe that this approach is the future, and it will bring even more prosperity to creators around the world.
They say the world is getting more and more digital, so it makes sense that whoever controls the internet controls the world. That’s why it’s not crazy to think that a visionary e-girl and her army of SIMPs will one day take over the world. All they need to do is to align their incentives properly and then it’s off to the races.
I call this new era “The Rise of the SIMP Economy”, the best part is, it doesn’t matter who you are, everyone can take advantage of this megatrend.
