Former Boston ICU nurse Allie Rae made international news in August last year after she was fired for running an extremely naughty Only Fans account on the side. The story appeared everywhere from the NY Post, to CNN, The Daily Beast \u2014 and she even made an appearance on Dr Phil.<\/b><\/p>\n
The resulting publicity saw fans subscribing in droves and the 37-year old mother of three now makes more than $200,000 a month.<\/span><\/p>\n But the same sort of moralizing and censorship that ended her nursing career also threatens her newfound wealth from Only Fans. Just six days after her story was made public, Only Fans announced it would ban \u201csexually explicit\u201d content, under pressure from its banking partners.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWhen 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,\u201d Rae says on the line from her new home in crypto friendly Florida.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIt was at that time that I figured out crypto was the answer.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n She\u2019s assembled a team of 20 developers and is putting the finishing touches on a new Only Fans meets Instagram style crypto-powered social platform called WetSpace. It\u2019s due to launch in beta in February, accepting payments in a range of stablecoins across different chains to mitigate issues with gas fees. NFT support will come in the project\u2019s second stage mid-year.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Porn has long been seen as one of the best chances crypto has for adoption: Users can remain anonymous and performers don\u2019t have to deal with payment processors charging them high fees or unilaterally cutting off services under opaque morality clauses.<\/span><\/p>\n Despite this, as <\/span>Magazine discovered in the past<\/span><\/a>, crypto payments have failed to take off. Pornhub tried and failed with Verge, then moved to using Pumapay\u2019s service, which was crippled by high gas fees on Ethereum and is in the process of relaunching on <\/span>Binance Smart Chain<\/span><\/a>. Spankchain attempted a more modest platform targeting crypto users but has had limited success so far, though it\u2019s still in the game and is developing \u2018<\/span>SpankPay V2<\/span>\u2019 based on user feedback. Cumrocket is developing an <\/span>NFT marketplace<\/span> but reports limited availability of its CUMMIES tokens on exchanges.<\/span><\/p>\n Rae believes a major problem is trying to launch projects with related adult tokens. <\/span>\u201cI had been watching the fall of other \u2018adult shit coins\u2019 and how their model was destined to fail serving two masters \u2014 creators and holders. That is when WetSpace came about.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Rae points out that adult coins add an extra step to the process and most are very volatile which isn\u2019t attractive to users or models.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cSo I thought,\u2019 Well we don\u2019t need a coin, like, why go through all the drama of this coin? Of course, you\u2019d get a lot of money up front, and it would definitely help fund your project. But luckily, I didn\u2019t need to be concerned about the financial side of it, because I had the money to put into it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The mother of three teenage sons, Rae is an unlikely porn star turned crypto entrepreneur. She joined the Navy at 17 and married husband Steven the following year (he sometimes stars in her videos). She then worked for five years in marketing, management and real estate, before getting her dream job in nursing. \u201cI was obsessed,\u201d she says. \u201cI was a straight A nursing student, it was truly my passion and still is, it really is.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Rae received a Masters in Nursing Education and specialized in Neonatal Intensive Care, nursing sick babies back to health. \u201cEven though it was such a tragic time for so many families there were also so many great moments,\u201d she says. \u201cI was a wonderful NICU nurse very, very good at my job.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n But bored at home during the pandemic, she started up an Instagram account posting about hockey and craft beer. This attracted a devoted male following, some of whom suggested she start an Only Fans. When she read news reports that the actress Bella Thorne had made $1M on the platform in a single day, she decided to take their advice.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n By the end of her first month she\u2019d made $6,900 \u2014 more than the $6,500 she was paid as a nurse.<\/span><\/p>\n Unfortunately for Rae not everyone is a fan of Only Fans and a group of six of what she calls her \u201cmean girl\u201d colleagues, led by a Pastor\u2019s wife, stumbled across her Instagram and then screenshotted her Only Fans content for management.<\/span><\/p>\n News spread like wildfire through the hospital and that was \u201cultimately what I think drove management to have to act.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cTheir 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\u2019t work there,\u201d she adds.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI wasn\u2019t mentally ready to leave, I\u2019ll tell you it was very difficult. There\u2019s a lot of tears shed in that. But I think given how toxic the environment and how judged I felt there, I wasn\u2019t looked at the same, it was probably the right thing to do.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Firing an ICU nurse in the middle of a pandemic due to her porny Only Fans account is an editor\u2019s wet dream (not Magazine of course, we\u2019re strictly interested in the future of finance) and the story went viral. She went from making $35K a month from her side hustle to $200K a month thanks to the publicity. Steven gave up his airline job to help full time with the business.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cOur success was just unbelievable and so it became hard to not make it a priority,\u201d she says.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s crazy to go from being a suburban hockey mom slash nurse to now I\u2019m like this advocate for the sex industry. I mean, it\u2019s very, very different.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Part of that advocacy is trying to figure out a way for creators and operators to escape the stranglehold that traditional payment processors have on it. In recent years the war on adult sites by payment processors has ramped up, supported by the emotive campaigns of anti-porn crusaders.<\/span><\/p>\n A case in point in the famed New York Times piece in December 2020 called <\/span>The Children of Pornhub<\/span><\/a>. Columnist Nicholas Kristof sensationally claimed the \u201csite 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.\u201d He argued the site facilitated sex trafficking and cited a petition with 2.1 million signatures calling for it to be closed.<\/span><\/p>\n Often mistakenly referred to as an investigation, the NYT billed the piece as \u201copinion\u201d meaning its usual standards of fact checking don\u2019t apply. <\/span>Mashable<\/span><\/a> summed up the piece as being based on the \u201cdubious and distorted findings and arguments of one anti-sex work conservative group\u201d. <\/span>It caused a massive backlash and MasterCard and Visa quickly announced they would no longer provide services to Pornhub, threatening the viability of the tie.<\/span><\/p>\n The deplatforming of sex sites by payment companies has ramped up considerably in recent years, following the passing of the controversial\u00a0 FOSTA-SESTA (Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act) in 2018.<\/span><\/p>\n Rae\u2019s first encounter with the issue, came when Only Fans caused outrage in August last year by announcing it would ban \u2018sexually explicit\u2019 content, threatening the livelihoods of 2 million creators making $2.3 billion a year. Founder and CEO of OnlyFans Tim Stokely blamed BNY Mellon, Metro Bank, and JPMorgan Chase for refusing to process payments, though the ban was quickly reversed after \u201cbanking partners\u2019 assurances that OnlyFans can support all genres of creators.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cA 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\u2019re making so much money. Now where are you going to put your content?\u201d she recalls.<\/span><\/p>\n Rae explains that she\u2019d considered other platforms but realized competitors \u201care at the mercy of the banks as well.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s when my brain really got to turn on to: what is the solution to this?,\u201d she says.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u201cAt that time, I didn\u2019t 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, you know, part of what\u2019s going on in terms of the big financial institutions.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cPorn is always looked at as taboo. There\u2019s a stigma out there. But the amount of control that these banking industries have, over every platform that runs primarily on fiat, is scary.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n
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How she got here<\/b><\/h4>\n
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<\/p>\nTailor made for the media<\/b><\/h4>\n
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Porn payments<\/b><\/h4>\n
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<\/p>\nCounterpoint<\/b><\/h4>\n
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Rae however believes times have changed and that the tech is more widespread and user friendly than ever before. She concedes the biggest hurdle will be helping noobs get started, but there will be step by step explainers and guides on how to buy crypto through a connected Coinbase, Metamask or Trust wallet.<\/span><\/p>\n