Adulting with the adult industry

Later in January 2018, we attended AVN in Las Vegas. It our first real dance with adult industry, and it was the place where the majority of performers and site operators first heard about SpankChain. We had a booth with Manuel Ferrara TV and TrenchCoatX, where we streamed the entire time live on Twitch. We realized that the people who were interested in what we were doing were having a difficult time understanding cryptocurrency and what exactly ETH is.

If we were going to have the impact we wanted to have on the adult industry, we had to bridge the knowledge gap between crypto and adult. And thus, CryptoTitties was born. CryptoTitties was a simple tool to educate, onboard, and reward the community just for getting involved. We created an incentive to learn how ETH payments work, and most importantly, how cryptocurrency can benefit the adult industry by providing sex workers with safer and more secure ways to receive and store payments.

Adventures in building our own camsite

As we started to scale, we launched the private beta of our crypto camsite, Spank.Live, in April 2018. Our goals with the camshows were to encourage tipping and to incentivize viewers to tip by showing them what was coming up if they did. The camsite also featured an integrated Spank Menu. (On other sites, this feature is called a Tip Menu, and it’s usually not well-integrated with the show experience.) Spank.Live had a lot of other bells and whistles that were hugely beneficial to performers and users, including geo-blocking (by country and region); muting options for certain words/phrases in chats; and muting options for different categories of viewers.

During private beta, we made some huge strides:

1110 wallets created

48.05 ETH tipped (to-date)

0.14369 ETH made on average, per show

48,874 chat Messages exchanged

10,585 total tips through the first production-ready payment channels on Ethereum mainnet

< 500 Milliseconds Video Latency

Our move to public beta happened in June, and we spent the summer on a high note. Performers were loving it! July was another month celebrations and new additions. Not only did Brenna Sparks officially join #TeamSpank as an advisor, but SpankChain rang in the 4th of July at one hell of a pool party.

Taking it all the way to the bank… the SpankBank

In August 2018, SpankChain got to work on the SpankBank. The SpankBank is an unstoppable Ethereum-based program that powers the two-token SpankChain ecosystem and provides an alternate l to conventional financial institutions. Here’s how it works: SPANK is a staking token which can be deposited with the SpankBank to earn newly minted BOOTY. BOOTY is low-volatility fee credit good for $1 worth of SpankChain services.

SpankBank fully launched on September 1st, 2018. Just as the entire dev team landed in Berlin on September 5th for Berlin Blockchain week, they were informed of a critical vulnerability in the code. Ameen started to review the code in baggage claim, and the dev team spent their first hours in Berlin around a table fixing the bug and announcing a relaunch. The transparency and quick response won people over, and by the next day $1M was re-staked. By September 13th, we had surpassed $30M, and by September 22nd, SpankBank had 300 stakers.

As of this writing (November 19th, 2018), the SpankBank holds $3,809,746. We have 636 current stakers and an average stake of $5,990. 13.2% of total SPANK is in the bank and 44% of the circulating supply is staked. Thank you for believing in us!

In BOOTY we trust

BOOTY, BOOTY, BOOTY, rockin’ everywhere!

On October 5th 2018, SpankChain launched BOOTY on Spank.Live. We knew that it would be buggy for a few days, so we worked closely with our performers to try to resolve all the issues as quickly as we could. This coincided with the beginning of SF blockchain week. A bunch of us were holed up in an Airbnb, working on the deployment together. After a couple days of major debugging, we were finally able to check out the hackathon for a bit. We celebrated the BOOTY launch at an after-party put on by MakerDAO. After a period of sobriety and hard work, Ameen decided to cut loose and have his first drink in two years.

That’s when the bomb dropped: Jasna received a message from Matthew Slipper, saying the our $30k contract only had five dollars in it now. Jasna sent Hunter (from Connext) on a mission to find Ameen and the rest of the devs, while she pulled out her laptop to set up a virtual meeting at a bar. The dev team realized we’d been hacked, so we packed up and headed back to the Airbnb to investigate. Naturally, we took the camsite down, while we did damage control.

We published all the details about the hack on Medium, so no one was in the dark. For the next week, SpankChain, Kyokan, and Connext held daily meetings to go through the contract code line-by-line and determine all issues. Ultimately, we decided that we should rewrite the code from scratch. Meanwhile, we reverted back to an old version of the camsite (which used the previous smart contract), so that our community could keep earning money while we worked on the new and improved version of the non-custodial contract.

On the drive back from SF to LA, Ameen got information about the hacker’s identity, and contacted them. They agreed to give the money back in exchange for a reward. The hacker also managed to free $4,000 worth of BOOTY tokens from the contract, which they sent back to us for an additional reward. In a stroke of luck, the black hat hacker decided to go white hat. Realizing we won’t always be so lucky, the team resolved to double down on security audits moving forward (and the hacker’s stayed on board to help out!).

The wild ride didn’t end post hack. Just a few days later, on October 15th, the Ethereum foundation announced Spankchain as a grantee for our payment channel technology. NBD!

To Devcon and beyond

And just a few weeks ago, in early November, we travelled to Prague for Devcon 4. Devcon is the annual Ethereum family reunion hosted by Ethereum Foundation. We hosted two successful talks that highlighted our tradition of balancing the bleeding edge of technology with an acute social awareness of sex work. Plus, SpankChain held a couple of parties, a diversity mixer, and may or may not have started a new fashion trend.