Rapture #114: Simpin' Ain't Easy

Never a dull day in crypto. This past week, Irene Zhao, a popular Twitter account, released a new NFT collection for a DAO called IreneDAO. The NFTs comprise of common crypto slang with provocative photos of Irene. If you buy one of these NFTs, you get exclusive access to a Discord with Irene and other NFT holders. Furthermore, you get exclusive access to content put out by Irene.

The financial success of this project, which has already garnered 2,000 ETH in volume (approximately $6.3 million) for the past three days and has a floor price of 1.8 ETH (approximately $3,200), proves that this business modal will become a new trend in adult entertainment.

Playboy -> PornHub -> OnlyFans -> SimpDAOs

Just as a quick update for all of us who don’t follow the adult entertainment industry, which I am sure is all of us, there has been a dramatic upheaval in the past five years. In 2016, a new site called OnlyFans was launched which effectively democratized adult entertainment, making it so anyone could easily sell access to their provocative content. OnlyFans had a net revenue of $1.2 billion 2021, which means that it is likely the most valuable adult entertainment industry in the business considering PornHub is rumored to be worth approximately $2 billion.

But what exactly is OnlyFans?

OnlyFans is a platform for content creators, often of the adult entertainment variety, to post content of themselves and charge their followers a monthly subscription in order to access the content. The platform then takes 20% of the subscription revenue generated while 80% is distributed to the creator.

While this may or may not be hard to believe, the top content creators on OnlyFans earn approximately $20 million per month, which is more than any other content creator known to me.

Despite OnlyFans being far more accretive to adult entertainment content creators than previous distribution models, removing the 20% take that OnlyFans charges and allowing for the market to determine the cost of access to the exclusive content opens the door to an even larger market size for this type of content. Thus, we have IreneDAO.

Industry Leaders Support IreneDAO, but also Allegations Arise

Even more jaw dropping than this trend itself is the fact that some of the largest industry leaders have come out in support of IreneDAO, including the Founder and CEO of the leading institutional digital asset merchant bank Mike Novogratz.

Despite a handful of industry leaders supporting the project, some critics did uncover that Irene Zhao might not actually be Irene Zhao, but a model named Yuqing Zhao. Furthermore, the accuser believes that this whole DAO is currently being run by a man posing as an Irene Zhao female character on Twitter.

Not the first time a man will pose as a woman for money, nor the last.

Takeaway

While this launch might become mired in controversy, I do think its success financially proves the upside for adult content creators SimpDAOs.

I will not comment on the ethics of the matter, but I would not be surprised to see more SimpDAOs coming to market shortly.