Allie Eve Knox is a porn star and cam model who’s made a small fortune in crypto.

She began accepting Bitcoin as payment in 2014 and sold her stack just before the all time high.

“I sold and bought my dream home in 2017, in the winter of that year,” she says.

She now promotes a startup called Spankchain – a cam site that only accepts cryptocurrency.

Crypto perverts are a unique audience she says.

“Yeah its funny. We had a show on New Year’s Eve and the performer was trying to do a cum show and everybody was just talking math in her chat room. You would never see this anywhere else” she says.

Cam girls love crypto

Knox reveals that cam girls love crypto because accepting money in any other form comes with high costs and the constant threat of account closure. Most cam models work for sites that look after payment processing for them – but they also take 50% of their income.

Knox tried to strike out on her own, by modelling on Skype and accepting money via PayPal and Google Pay.

“But I was getting all my stuff shut down because it’s against the terms of service, you can’t do anything like this,” she says. “One of my regulars on my cam site came in and said why don’t you take some Bitcoin?”

Bitcoin journey begins

The client helped her open a Coinbase account and would pay her in BTC. “I’d put the QR code up to the camera, he’d scan it and he send me Bitcoin directly. There were no chargebacks.”

Chargebacks are a huge problem with adult services – users (or their partners) frequently get buyer’s remorse and ring up their credit card companies to get a refund. Knox says that even if a model can find a credit card provider, they charge an extra 10% to cover chargebacks.

“We’re labelled high risk,” she says. Chargebacks, obviously don’t happen with BTC.

Armpit licking fetish

Apart from cams, Knox does porn and fetish clips. Really odd ones like sex acts in clown make up or very messily eating ribs. These came about after one of her customers asked her to lick her armpit for $300.

“I make most of my money off clips, I do weird stuff, meme stuff, fun stuff. I realised when I started camming … there was a whole lot of money in the fetish world.”

As you may have guessed, credit card providers also prohibit various fetish acts.

Putting Spank in the SpankBank

Since the beginning of last year, Knox has been involved with Spankchain – a cam site that takes just 5% commission and pays in its own stablecoin called BOOTY.

The site has a definite sense of humour. Spankchain was created by ‘Spanktoshi Nakabooty’ and the BOOTY token is generated when users stake another token called Spank, in something called the ‘SpankBank’.

700 performers and $100k in crypto

The site has 700 performers, attracted by the prospect of keeping 95% of their earnings rather than 50%. Still in beta, it’s processed more than $100,000 in crypto.

“The girls (can also perform) a bunch of content that’s banned on credit card processing sites like blood and pee. Which is really wonderful.”

A clip site is in the works and they’re going to offer payment processing for other sites too.

Crypto payments face uphill battle

Like most sites that take crypto, the hard part is enticing users who don’t know anything about it, to find out how to buy some crypto in the first place so they can pay for stuff with it.

“That’s pretty much the number one thing. It’s really hard to buy crypto immediately, you have to do KYC, buy some crypto move it over, wait a few days, its a whole thing … Also the market tanked so people aren’t really ready to get rid of their crypto, they’re hanging on to it waiting for it to go back up.”

Late last year Spankchain has to downsize from 12 team members to eight due to crypto winter. But Knox says they have funding to last two years and will start expanding internationally in the middle of this year.