Crypto is the path to “self-sovereign finance” according to SpankChain CEO Ameen Soleimani, who envisions a future where adult entertainers and consumers are no longer subject to the whims of unfriendly centralized banking systems and credit card institutions.
Since inception, Soleimani has outlined his vision to the SpankChain team and the reasons behind his every maneuver, to ensure they understand what is at stake behind each coming milestone.
It’s been inspiring seeing the adult and crypto communities come together on our cam site. In the next few months we plan to add private/group shows and expand internationally, since we’re only admitting U.S.-based performers for now.
With a flat hierarchy in the company aimed at strong collaboration, and partnerships with well-respected adult talent like company co-founder Janice Griffith, “crypto cutie” Brenna Sparks and clip artist/cam model Allie Eve Knox — all of them SpankChain advisors — Soleimani is laser-focused on creating products that serve his target community.
And with a presence at numerous crypto conferences and adult industry tradeshows like XBIZ Miami, XBIZ L.A. and XBIZ Berlin, Soleimani knows the value of staying visible, staying abreast of the latest developments and cultivating enduring contacts.
Ever evolving, SpankChain now offers a camming platform, and is already eyeing the clips and affiliate game for future endeavors. By integrating crypto in so many facets, which may one day even spawn the capacity for adult talent to create their very own currencies within his economic system, Soleimani seeks to corner the market for maximum impact.
To walk the cutting-edge of crypto with one of its most profound innovators, XBIZ linked up on the blockchain with Soleimani for this exclusive executive suite interview.
XBIZ: Tell us about the genesis of SpankChain. How has the over-arching company mission evolved since launch?
Soleimani: SpankChain started with an epiphany: the people who are most motivated to migrate to a new financial system are the ones most discriminated against by the existing one.
Adult performers and businesses have routinely had their bank accounts shut down and their funds seized or frozen by financial institutions like PayPal, and they are routinely refused service by the major payment processors like Visa and Mastercard.
This kind of prejudicial treatment made the adult industry a prime candidate for cryptocurrency and self-sovereign finance. Our success in the adult industry will set the stage for mainstream consumer adoption of this new financial model.
Since its genesis, the overarching mission of the company hasn’t changed — we remain committed to building crypto-economic infrastructure for the adult industry that is aligned with the ideals of freedom, sex-positivity and financial inclusion.
XBIZ: What is your management strategy for executing the company vision and empowering employees to succeed?
Soleimani: The company vision is incredibly ambitious, and I think everyone on our team is utterly insane for trying to achieve it. My job is as much about communicating that vision, as it is breaking it down into tangible product milestones that we can conquer as a team.
Because SpankChain is a small organization, we have a flat hierarchy and two main teams: Development and Community. We have weekly all-hands meetings to discuss progress on all fronts, and each team has its own daily meetings (shorter ones) to discuss daily objectives. To make sure everyone in the company has their voice heard, I have one-on-ones with everyone in the company at least once a month.
I think an important part of the management of SpankChain is what we do to get the company culture right. On the practical side, we’ve succeeded at building a culture of efficiency, which means shipping products and iterating quickly, holding ourselves accountable to deadlines, and learning quickly from our mistakes.
Confidence and ambition are integral parts of our culture as well, which is why we make sure that everyone in the company knows why we’re doing what we’re doing, and why their particular role is important. At the end of the day we are a team, and we win or lose as a team.
XBIZ: Discuss your approach to recruiting SpankChain talent advisors like Brenna Sparks, Allie Eve Knox and Janice Griffith. What are their main roles for the brand?
Soleimani: We first met Janice last summer, and she joined as a co-founder and adult industry liaison. She was generous with her network of industry contacts and helped us learn more about the cultural “dos and don’ts” of the industry, so we didn’t make fools of ourselves, which we still managed to do on occasion.
Allie joined as the performer community manager in February and has been invaluable ever since. She’s the primary point of contact for performers using the platform. Allie helps answer performers’ crypto questions, schedules featured shows, does product testing and communicates product requests from the community to our developers.
Brenna joined this past summer as an advisor, and she’s been a social media sensation. She’s the undisputed queen of crypto. If you don’t believe me, search “Brenna Sparks prophecy.” She’s been helping to promote awareness about SpankChain on social media and has attended multiple crypto conferences and hack-a-thons with the team.
XBIZ: Why should consumers and adult industry stakeholders utilize SpankChain, versus traditional payment methods?
Soleimani: As a performer or adult industry stakeholder, you can use SpankPay (our crypto payment processor) to take payments from anywhere on Earth with no chargebacks and 0.5% fees.
Anyone with a SpankPay account can spend on your site instantly, without having to enter excessive personal information. We also offer instant payouts through our merchant dashboard, so you don’t have to wait to get paid.
In my experience, most adult payment systems feel adversarial, like the site is trying to scam me into signing up for a large monthly subscription that they want me to forget about or make difficult to cancel. It honestly sucks, and I know Millennials like me aren’t going to put up with it.
When it comes to our money, we want things that are user-friendly and direct. If you want to capture the new generation of porn buyers, you’ll want to upgrade to the best digital payment experience on the planet — SpankPay.
XBIZ: What is unique about SpankChain compared to more typical crypto offerings?
Soleimani: For starters, we’re pioneering the blockchain scalability technology known as “payment channels” which allows us to process transactions instantly without waiting for a confirmation time — which beats all other crypto payment systems that currently exist.
On top of that, we built our own native stablecoin, called BOOTY, which is “pegged” to $1 in our ecosystem — get it? Booty is pegged. All jokes aside, this allows viewers and performers to avoid price fluctuations of using Bitcoin or Ethereum directly, while still reaping the benefits of using crypto. In BOOTY we trust.
To manage the BOOTY supply, we launched an algorithmic central bank called the SpankBank, which our stakeholders can use to mint new BOOTY as our platform grows. It has a silly name, but it’s actually a revolutionary new model for cooperation in the adult industry. Anyone who wants is welcome to join as a stakeholder and participate in the growth of our network.
We’re also getting ready to launch our own crypto exchange, which will be called … ComeSwap! It will certainly have the best liquidity. Did we mention we have the best names?
XBIZ: Talk about your camming site and its focus on pairing live video broadcasting services with your cryptoeconomic platform. How do you plan on launching its various features in the next few months to come?
Soleimani: Spank.Live has been in public beta since April. It has the lowest latency video on Earth, averaging about 500ms — “tip to moan” time is an important metric for us. So far we haven’t taken any fees on the cam site but as we get closer to launch we’re starting to take 5 percent fees, which is the lowest we know about.
It’s been inspiring seeing the adult and crypto communities come together on our cam site. In the next few months we plan to add private/group shows and expand internationally, since we’re only admitting U.S.-based performers for now.
We’re also building our own clip site. After that, we plan to launch our own affiliate platform, so fans and friends can directly engage with performers to share links to their shows and earn an affiliate fee in real-time.
XBIZ: Since your team frequently attends crypto and adult tradeshows, what are your primary goals at these events?
Soleimani: We want to communicate our overarching vision to everyone we network with; however, different audiences will of course have different concerns and knowledge bases.
In the adult world, we want to build awareness around SpankChain and cryptocurrency, in general. We also want to find more users and onboard more performers. We gave away $20,000 to performers at an event this year for signing up for CryptoTitties.com! More recently, we’re starting to look for partners who want to integrate SpankPay and join our merchant network.
In the crypto community, we want to encourage sex-positivity, as it really is a numbers game. The more people who continue to have positive, respectful interactions with sex workers (both as performers and as peers), the easier it becomes to transcend the stigma around sex work and the adult industry.
There’s already some overlap in the communities, mind you; I know of at least five performers who are in a relationship with crypto-traders. But there’s still more work to be done. For all its rhetoric about financial liberation and “unbanking the banked,” the crypto community is largely ignorant of the discrimination adult professionals face at the hands of established banking institutions. In many ways, they are fighting the same battle, and would be much better off joining forces.
XBIZ: Discuss your marketing strategy for cultivating a dedicated SpankChain community of cam models, users and more.
Soleimani: So far, our community has grown more or less organically. We haven’t done much paid marketing and our community of performers, users and enthusiasts continues to grow, interact and learn from one another.
This kind of organic growth tells us that we’re on to something, and solving a very real problem. All that being said, we continue to recruit the most curious and enthusiastic performers to build out our core community.
Crypto has a bit of a learning curve, and a lot of what we do is helping to dispel all the misinformation out there. We educate our performers and they educate each other on everything from the basics of sending and receiving payments to more advanced topics like security and using decentralized exchanges.
XBIZ: Where do you envision the crypto market heading and how will SpankChain stay ahead of the curve?
Soleimani: At SpankChain, we’re betting on two things: that the global consumer adoption of cryptocurrency is inevitable and that it will start with the adult industry. There are some kinks that need to be worked out, like account recovery, two-factor authentication and scalability, but these are just temporary roadblocks.
The benefits of cryptocurrency for adult are undeniable — just ask anyone who has had their PayPal account frozen or bank account shut down. As Brenna told the attendees of the ETHBerlin Hackathon last month: “Blockchain offers freedom from a world that doesn’t want me.” Each of us now has a choice: Do we continue to support a financial system that is happy to oppress us, or do we take the leap to an open, inclusive financial system aligned with our values?
SpankChain will stay on the bleeding edge by empowering innovators and entrepreneurs in the industry to build out their dreams. We can’t do this alone, and the future is going to be weirder than we all expect. Our best chance at staying ahead is working together with the brilliant creative minds in the adult industry to invent the future we collectively want, rather than trying to play catch up.
XBIZ: What’s next for your company in the years to come?
Soleimani: This might sound a bit strange, but I think conditions are ripe for a sex-positivity revolution. In the wake of movements like #MeToo and #TimesUp, and with STD testing getting so cheap you can get results back in 15 minutes for $100, now is the time to rethink our relationship with sex to make for a more consensual, healthy and ultimately gratifying sex culture.
As it pertains to crypto, I think this is a global movement and SpankChain is riding that wave. The proverbial iron is hot, so to speak, so we’re trying to corner the adult-crypto market while we still can. That means investing in and incubating startups that want to build applications and services on our platform.
We’re even toying with the idea of developing a platform that allows performers to launch their own tokens. Our long-term goal is to establish ourselves as the infrastructure provider for the entire adult industry.
