Happy One-Year Anniversary, Spankers!

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SpankChain

11 min readNov 20, 2018

Break out the bubbly! The holidays aren’t the only reason to celebrate. SpankChain is officially turning one! The revolutionary blockchain-based financial ecosystem for the adult industry has done a lot of growing up in the past 365 days, and we’re eager to share our progress and hopes for the future with all of you. What started out as a 119-slide genesis deck by Spanktoshi Nakabooty has turned into a full-fledged company, 8 team members strong. Together, we’re bringing the core benefits of blockchain technology — privacy, security, self-sovereign identity, and economic efficiency — to the adult entertainment industry.

Here’s our one-year long journey, by the numbers:

3,733+ Spank wallets created
$300,000+ processed
Over 32,000 tips sent, instantly
329 performers joined
314,800+ messages sent between models and users

Once upon a time in Starbucks…

While SpankChain’s official birthday is Nov. 20th, 2017 (when our ICO ended), that’s not when the idea for the company was conceived (wink, wink). SpankChain’s story actually began that previous summer. Night after night, co-founder Ameen Soleimani sat at in a Starbucks, adjusting his monitor vigilantly, as not to reveal the NSFW content of his screen. At the time, SpankChain was just an idea, and one that only a handful of people knew about.

Back then, Ameen Soleimani and SpankChain VP of Engineering James Young were working together at MetaX (a Consensys company), where James was the CTO and Ameen was a solidity developer. Ameen asked Consensys to fund his state channel research, using the adult industry as a testing ground for mainstream adoption. Consensys passed, siting the ethical dilemma they would face from company partners, but that didn’t stop Ameen.

Summer of Spank

On June 9th, 2017 (yes… 6/9), a 119-slide deck titled “SpankChain — A live video micropayments platform for adults” hit Reddit. 100 of those 119 pages was chock-full of market research. That was the moment SpankChain went from an idea to harbinger of a movement towards a decentralized adult industry.

The deck caused quite the buzz.

A lot of readers reached out too. One of those individuals was William (“Wills”) de Vogelaere, SpankChain’s Co-founder. Wills slid into Ameen’s proverbial DMs, requesting to join the project as a designer.

As luck would have it, Ameen, James, and Wills were all working in Venice, which allowed them to move quickly. The trio got an office in a garage and got to work.

The Hollywood “Mansion” Days

By August 2017, the team had begun to expand. There were four team members in L.A., one in Russia, one in Canada, and two in New York. So, we rented a mansion in Hollywood to kick things off in a more formal fashion and get everyone together. This space became our hacker house, where people could come work, live, and get to know each other. It wasn’t always as glamorous as it sounds. At one point, there were 12 people living in a three-bedroom spot. People were sleeping on the kitchen floor. We spent a lot of sleepless nights together, playing hours of PUBG (a computer game with a premise not unlike Hunger Games). Things got messy, the pool turned green, and we could barely keep up with taking out the trash, but we made it through.

Throughout the Hollywood days, we focused a lot on our state channels research, namely the state channel auction contract for the upcoming SpankChain ICO. On August 20th, we released our Payment Channels Tech demo with Janice Griffith to demonstrate that we could actually build what we promised we could. It was important to us ship an actual product before going into our ICO. We didn’t have to do this, as no one else was. There were (and are) a lot of teams out there relying solely on their whitepaper, but that wasn’t good enough for us.

Whitepaper woes and ICO ickiness

In September 2017, we came down from our house in the hills and set up shop back in the garage. With a demo out, we needed to focus on exposure and our whitepaper. We officially announced the ICO on the 14th, but still no whitepaper. Developers aren’t necessarily known for their way with words, so it was definitely a struggle to organize our thoughts and make something so technical easy to digest. We managed to get it together and released the best whitepaper we could draft, just a week before the token sale. To gain more exposure, we debuted a promotional video which made… quite the splash compared to other ICO launch promos. Having a famous adult performer in ours certainly didn’t hurt.

Once the ICO was released, the pressure turned all the way up. We honestly didn’t think we were going to make it at any point, until the soft cap was reached. At the time of our ICO, ETH was in a bear market with Segwit2x happening, which meant ETH holders were buying Bitcoin. There was also the fact that our auction was designed to be fair — it did not favor people placing money in early — which meant we were freaking the fuck out. About half way through the auction we realized the block times were updated and smaller; we were going to lose a day and our auction would end prematurely. We brought back kayden to explain how this new type of auction worked, since we didn’t think people were getting it.

In the final 12 hours, the $5mm soft cap was reached. Throughout this process, every single one of us thought about cancelling the sale at one point or another. Thankfully, none of us backed down and we managed to support each other. And in the end, we made it!

New Year, new camshow

We rang in 2018 with a New Year’s Day camshow, AKA the first blockchain-based orgasm. Our goal was to build out a system that could scale. We would come to realize that there was an “intimacy quotient.” The faster a performer responded to a tip, the better the engagement. This was directly related to latency. By teaming up with Cosmos (Dr. Alex) we were able to deploy a scalable infrastructure that could support 50,000k simultaneous streams with less than one-second latency.

The camshow was no easy feat, and no one slept. We did manage to take quick break and went out to the club for the countdown — it was New Year’s after all. We rushed back (having had a few drinks) and continued coding and hacking all the way up to 12:01 am, just as the show was starting. We ate McDonalds breakfast on our roof, as Giselle Palmer was downstairs doing the show. Jasna Todorovic, SpankChain’s Computer Systems Analyst, who had joined a few weeks earlier, streamed the show to her living room and watched it with her roommate. It must have been an… interesting bonding experience. As thrilled as we were to get the show online, it wasn’t perfect. The servers crashed from the load, the video quality was terrible, and there were trolls in the chat. That all being said, we still had a great time making it happen.

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!

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.

To top it off: SpankChain was named Best Utility Token at the Mainframe HQ Dapp Awards. It couldn’t have been a more fitting end a whirlwind of a first year.

To boldly go…

It’s hard to believe all this happened in a single year: hacks, awards, Spank.bank, and Spank.live. We travelled to Malta, Berlin, Prague (twice), Buenos Aires, and all over the USA. We’ve created a real, working product that has actual users.

Right now, the crypto world is thinning out. As the market shifts, shitcoins and opportunists are leaving, along with projects that didn’t have much substance. The companies left are here because they believe in the tech, in the vision, and in the long game. We’re more dedicated than ever to rolling out our SpankPay wallet SDK, creating our high liquidity, decentralized exchange, Come.Swap, launching our clipsite, and normalizing saying “the BOOTY is pegged” in any and all serious professional environments.

The payment struggles in the adult industry haven’t ceased, and the gatekeepers are just starting to take our crypto solutions seriously. We’ve got strong partnerships to announce in the next quarter, and we’re finalists for three potential XBIZ awards — including “innovative web product of the year”.

We are so grateful to our community for having joined us on this adventure.

We’re more determined than ever to ship. All aboard!