SALT LAKE CITY – Internet users love them. But mainstream payment processors hate working with them. Adult websites exist in an economic purgatory that, at best, makes them harder and costlier to connect to the conventional banking system than most other online businesses.
Which is why Crass Kitty, the pseudonymous founder of artificial intelligence-powered sexting website MyPeach.AI, is turning to crypto.
MyPeach.AI users might not realize that when they're, say, flirting with an AI-generated clone of an OnlyFans girl or paying for an alluring (also AI-generated) personalized image. Many of them will likely be paying by credit card, after all.
Invisible to them, however, is that they're actually buying stablecoins. Those go to MyPeach.ai to cover the startup's payroll, the high cost of generating AI content and the real-life OnlyFans models who agreed to let the website train its AI models on their images, voice and personality.
Kitty says payment processors charge a 3-5% fee when customers use a card to buy crypto. For adult entertainment purchases, it's 10-15% – an exorbitant amount, Kitty says.
"There's a real incentive to build on crypto," she said.
So, to be clear, MyPeach.AI's customers are getting adult content. And some of them may be using a credit card to pay for it. If they do, behind the scenes, what's really happening is they're purchasing a stablecoin and sending it to MyPeach.AI – all because payment processors charge through the nose for adult entertainment.
Porn sites notoriously suffer high rates of chargebacks that have prompted card processors to impose higher-than-normal transaction fees. This puts a squeeze on the business owners: They're not making as much money from their customers.
Crypto isn't a catch-all solution. As Kitty found in her previous adult-themed crypto business – a marketplace for buying and selling NFTs of porn stars – newbies seldom tolerate setting up wallets, acquiring tokens and then sending them to addresses. It's just too much friction.
Kitty is developing her site at the mtnDAO hacker house in Salt Lake City. At a previous mtnDAO, Kitty decided to pivot to AI. Her bet was that people would flock to the tailored experiences that large language models can be trained to create. As OnlyFans has shown, they're also willing to pay a premium for personalized sexual content.
MyPeach.AI combines both with a bit of crypto. It incentivizes users to exchange flirty texts with AI personas – either trained to their sexual preferences or to mimic real-life models – by paying them PEACH tokens. The users can pay PEACH tokens in exchange for AI-generated images. If they don't have enough tokens, they can top up with a credit card (that's where the stablecoin workaround comes in).
According to Kitty, a handful of banks are willing to work with crypto companies. A few are also willing to work with adult entertainment businesses. But none seem willing to work with crypto-powered adult entertainment businesses.
"Being able to have most of our treasury on-chain means we don't have to worry about, if our banks shut us down, losing all of our funds," she said.
Kitty's been coming to mtnDAO since the August 2022 edition. The bustling and loud hacker house is a change of pace from her normal cadence of working from home in a Seattle apartment. In Salt Lake City, she said, it's "been very helpful to have live feedback from the audience at mtnDAO – from a bunch of dudes."