Just a few years ago, it seemed like crypto could lead a sex work revolution. In 2020, Visa and Mastercard blocked its cards from being used to buy premium subscriptions on Pornhub, forcing the site to announce that it would only accept payments in cryptocurrency. By 2021, major crypto apps like Coinbase were increasingly common, but sex workers quickly turned their attention to SpankChain, which had long branded itself as the cryptocurrency for sex workers. A news report from 2018 alleged the company had paid cam models around $70,000 worth of crypto in its first few months of operation, and the site’s PR ramped up in 2021, with $100,000 giveaways advertised on Twitter.

1/ Announcing the 2021 @SpankPay Giveaway!

We LOVED the #Bitcoin giveaway @jack and @hotgirlmeg did last week on @cashapp…

So we’re giving away $100,000 in #Bitcoin to sex workers on @SpankPay!

Let’s start 2021 with a BANG! Details below pic.twitter.com/Nsr9wGz0qs

— SpankChain (@SpankChain) January 1, 2021

But by 2023, everything had gone wrong.

Early media interest in SpankChain was buoyed by the charismatic Allie Knox, who had already spent years accepting crypto tips in her cam shows when she started working for SpankChain in 2017. Knox recalls that a fan told her to download Coinbase during a cam show when she was new to sex work in 2014. Minutes later, she received her first ever Bitcoin payment.

Immediately, Knox could see the appeal. “Cam sites take half of your earnings,” she explains. “If you’re paying me $100, I only get $50. It’s fucking wild. I was also selling videos on clip sites, but they take 40 percent.” And she didn’t have anywhere else to turn for better rates. Already, her accounts on PayPal, CashApp and Venmo had been shut down. “They were saying that I was violating terms of service by selling sexual services. I was selling fucking socks, accepting tips and taking the occasional Skype call. It’s stupid, but they started shutting my ass down.”

Knox was among the earliest sex workers to start accepting crypto, initially billed as the go-to currency of the dark web. Not only did crypto allow her to accept payments without other sites taking huge cuts, but she could also evade the all-seeing eye of apps like PayPal, known for locking sex workers out of their accounts without notice. Plus, crypto felt exciting. Knox stayed in touch with her crypto-advisory fan through Snapchat, and asked for his advice when the amount in her digital wallet skyrocketed overnight. “I remember texting him, ‘Oh my god, the price has changed!’ I thought I was rich, that it was so great, but I had no fucking clue.”

Thrilled by the prospect of her digital bounty, Knox waxed lyrical about crypto on a 2017 show called Dark Net, waving her QR code at the camera to show sex workers how to accept crypto tips. “The next day, Coinbase shut my ass down,” she laughs. “Crypto is supposed to have no censorship, so I started talking about this in interviews, and I had a friend point me in the direction of SpankChain. They were trying to do crypto for sex workers. This guy talked to me about how my story was so needed, so the next day I woke up and was like, ‘You know what? These frat boys, they’re fucking tech bros. They need a sex worker on their side.’”

SpankChain started out as a cam site with its own cryptocurrency, BOOTY, and was billed as a sex-positive alternative to other crypto companies. Knox wanted in. “I wrote the CEO a job description and a summary of why they should hire me, and at the end, I added, ‘At least use me for promotion, because I have a really big ass.’ The CEO wrote back immediately, ‘A big ass, you say?’ I was like, ‘Okay, these are my people,’” Knox laughs.

Of course, SpankChain wasn’t the only porn-specific cryptocurrency in the game (TitCoin, founded in 2014, and CumRocket’s 2021 CUMMIES, boosted by none other than Elon Musk, to name a few), but SpankChain stood out by bringing Knox, an actual sex worker, into the fold. Before long, SpankChain had its own cryptocurrency, SpankPay.

But they had a problem: They still needed a payment processor to convert this into actual cash. “You still have to have banks,” Knox explains. “SpankPay [used] a company called Wyre. When they went under in 2023, they got bought out by a company that basically said, ‘Fuck the sex workers.’”

The porn industry remained under regulatory attack and rebuilding SpankPay grew impossible. “We were pissing away so much money trying to build this product that we probably wouldn’t be able to keep,” she says. And just like that, SpankChain ceased trading, and the remaining cash in the treasury is now being used to fund the likes of Knox and their lobbyists, who focus on activism and fighting the endless red tape in the industry.

Mike Stabile, Director of Public Policy at the adult industry trade association Free Speech Coalition (FSC), explains that sex workers wouldn’t need to rely on crypto like SpankChain if banks didn’t practice financial discrimination against them. “Every two to three years, we see what’s called a de-risking,” he explains. “A large bank would decide they weren’t going to work with the adult [industry] any more, and suddenly hundreds, maybe thousands, of people would lose their accounts. We never really know, because not everybody talks about it.”

In 2023, an FSC survey of over 600 sex workers found that 63 percent had had some kind of banking account shut down due to sex work. Knox experienced this so frequently that she had to put her assets in her husband’s name. “I couldn’t get a mortgage, and I was trying to buy a home,” she tells me. Then, they divorced. “That’s been a real fucking bitch.” This sort of discrimination can even follow sex workers who left the industry; for example, a residuals check from a porn movie made 10 years ago could flag an account.

As Knox explains, banks flag accounts for transactions that could indicate “human trafficking.” “It can literally mean paying for travel, or lingerie or staying in hotels. Micro-payments count, too. If I withdraw three times from my OnlyFans, but I’m also getting a deposit from my Poshmark, I might have five micropayments in a day, which are flags. But instead of looking at reports and saying, ‘Is this a human trafficker or not?’, banks are just saying, ‘Fuck it, throw them out.’ And there’s been no regulation that says they can’t do that.”

The FSC is currently working on building a credit union to circumvent this financial precarity, but in the meantime, they’re raising the issue with members of Congress. “It’s been pretty shocking,” says Knox. “Both the Democrats and Republicans have been like, ‘Oh, we get it.’ Republicans have gone through this with gun sales, and Democrats have seen it with different minorities — at one point, Iranian women couldn’t get a bank account.”

This is why both Knox and Stabile are optimistic that regulators will come through to support sex workers, especially given the huge number of people now using sites like OnlyFans. “It used to be that you maybe knew your neighbor’s cousin had shot a porno once, but now, three girls on my street are content creators,” says Knox. Plus, she adds, the FSC is currently supporting a bill that would bar banks from discriminating against legal businesses. “The majority of sex workers — porn stars, content creators — are legal, so that’s going to give us some protection,” she says.

And while SpankChain may be gone, Knox will still accept the other coins in your crypto wallet. “If you want to pay me in crypto, fine,” she tells me. “If you want to pay me in goats, fine. It doesn’t matter to me, because my options are so limited. I just have to try and collect my money however I can.”