This is the story of why I care so much about actual decentralization of NFTs.

So.

I first heard about NFTs in September 2020 and began minting on October 3.

Rarible was the pretty much the only open platform back then… no one minted directly on OpenSea at that point, and there were no viable alternative chains like Tezos yet.

I jumped right in and minted a bunch of GIFs on Rarible. A week or two later, one was censored from my page. There was no nudity in this NFT, just me wearing a strap-on and lingerie.

No one seemed to care about this censorship.

I tweeted about it and tried to reach out to Rarible. I got no explanation from them, no response to my many attempts at communication.

Very few artists/collectors in the community had much to say about it, either. Of course, I was new, and my account was much smaller, but so was the whole community. I know for a fact that people saw me and just didn’t… care enough.

This showed me that people only selectively care about censorship, and that there was absolutely no precedent for sex workers in NFTs… especially not sex workers making art challenging heteronormativity.

It became clear that this fight against censorship and stigma was about to be very lonely.

But I still used Rarible for a while, until artists started minting right on OpenSea. Even after I stopped using Rarible, I noticed them censoring me again in a different way, effectively hiding several of my NFTs from my page (not fully removing them like the other, but hiding their visibility from my “created” tab). These were again non-nude, if that even matters. I did get in touch with someone from their team about this. They claimed it was a bug or some shit and that they would never censor… lol, ok, sure.

At this point, I was ready to see new platforms just for NSFW 18+ NFTs. Everyone was excited for this and always talked about it as inevitable. Like they were going to solve all of our “problems.”

NSFW-specific NFT platforms started emerging in spring 2021. I was invited to participate in their launches. They wanted me on their side as one of the “pioneer” sex workers in this space. I tried to give them a chance and was legitimately excited to be involved with some of them, until they killed the hope I had left.

Of course, many of these 18+ crypto platforms are scammy as fuck, preying on sex workers who they assume know less, or seem more desperate to make money, or seem willing to put up with the exploitation that we are used to. This is an issue, but not my main point today. My point today is that the ones that are not necessarily scammy are still a different kind of dangerous.

When I say dangerous, I mean repeated predatory behavior, or threats of doxxing and hacking and putting sex worker artists on 4chan, and then harassing us when we try to talk about what they’ve done. I mean more of the same old shit that we see in web2, but coming from batshit crazy anons who will not hesitate to publicly blackmail you.

For my own protection, I will not name these platforms, but I’m sure I’ll be hearing from them for this anyway. In fact, there are so many problems with so many platforms, I could be talking vaguely about one and then I start getting harassed by another who thought I was talking about them. But rest assured, I am definitely talking about the bigger names you have heard of. They may not seem dangerous nowadays because they had to clean up their act, but I have seen who they are at their very foundation.

And I know that they’ll continue to gaslight and deny, despite the many many screenshots. These teams are extremely manipulative.

And yes, this includes those teams that have women and sex workers on the teams. We are not a monolith and they are not exempt from horrible behavior that exploits other women.

Some sex workers didn’t really care about all this, or didn’t know, or didn’t know what to do, or got scared, others were manipulated, others stayed because the platform had given (or promised) them money. Though most of these platforms lacked the buyers who were actually there to support the creators (they just wanted to get themselves rich off the platform token), many of the sex workers being onboarded were new to crypto and were just there to diversify their platforms. And of course, we’re pretty used to shitty platforms in web2 and having to accept whatever we can get.

But I wanted nothing to do with these platforms after seeing who these teams really were and what they were capable of (and I’m talking about multiple team members, it was not just a one-person issue). I knew we didn’t need them. I knew there’s no building on a rotten foundation. I knew there was more to this technology than just replicating the old structures. We didn’t have to settle. I tried to talk about this but many people justified the horrendous behavior or wanted to stay to help them clean up their image. These platforms publicly brushed off the issues as FUD. There was a lot of gaslighting.

It was the kind of dynamic you see in abusive relationships, and it was really disturbing.

Other NSFW platforms that were not this dangerous still didn’t cut it for me. After they saw me talking about these issues, they seemed to want to use it as an opportunity for themselves, to make themselves look like a better option. It was only then, waaaay after the fact, that they thought about involving sex workers on their teams or even asking for feedback. I was asked for multiple free consultations, lmao. Of course by now they have brought in other sex workers to look more legit, but that was too little too late for me. Especially after I and others risked our safety to share these stories, which they just seemed to want to piggyback off of.

This was all very isolating, scary, and horrible for my mental health. I had to share what happened to protect others, but that could get me doxxed (a serious danger for me) or at the very least hurt my “market” by screaming on social media about something that no one really understood or could help with. So I tried to stay vague when talking about it public, and spread the details far and wide via DMs as best I could, but even that was exhausting.

I took a long break from NFTs, cut off a lot of people, was on and off of Twitter breaks. I blocked these platforms and tried to push it out of my mind and hoped that karma or something would take care of things, while I focused on building something more positive that aligned with my values. By now I had other SWer friends and likeminded people around me, but I’ve still really been the main one putting myself out there in mainstream NFTs fighting for this, without settling. And that’s been pretty exhausting.

Others have since asked me to endorse their NSFW platforms, but it started to feel like they just wanted my endorsement for the sake of having my name on on their side. They had little to no prior experience with NFTs and seemed to just be jumping at the opportunity to take advantage of this market after seeing what happened. They just wanted me to tell them about my horrible experiences and get my advice and endorsement without involving me in any meaningful way. And without offering to pay me… what a great way to show you support sex workers, huh. Too bad, I probably could have helped build some great platforms.

I decided to stick with OpenSea and HEN/Tezos, and that’s what I’d recommend to other sex workers entering NFTs. After all, art labeled “NSFW” shouldn’t have to be separated from mainstream platforms in the first place, but that’s a whole other conversation…

I then started pursuing my own smart contract and storefront. And so you see how by not settling for shit, I was able to get the best option of all!

I always knew there was a way to deploy your own contract using Rarible, but obviously wanted nothing to do with them. So I explored and tried out some other options, and eventually was fortunate enough to create a contract with Manifold in October 2021. They helped me out behind the scenes before opening to the public and for that I am grateful.

I since have been able to sell from my own contract directly on my own website. No OpenSea. And since Manifold opened to the public, deploying contracts with them became much more affordable, so I have even created a second contract for another collection, and I am exploring all sorts of options for setting up marketplaces.

Of course, many of these tools are still works-in-progress, and most artists don’t understand why self-owned contracts matter or that it’s even an option. Because they don’t actually need to think about it like I do. But this experience connected me with many other people building towards this same avenue of self-sovereignty. And I think we need to build together, with the most marginalized at the center.

NFTs are not decentralized until all artists have the ability to create our own smart contracts and easily set up our own NFT storefronts.

ALL OF US -- not just the rich top-selling artists or the ones who happen to have dev friends.

ALL OF US -- especially those of us who are the first to be deplatformed, both in web2 and web…2.5. Because we can’t really call this shit web3, not yet.

This process of doing it myself BECAUSE I HAD TO is what made me so passionate. This technology is supposed to make us more independent. It’s supposed to cut out the middleman, not create a new one. It’s supposed to bring us sovereignty, not more of the same old shit. Let’s fucking use this tech how it’s meant to be used.

So what’s next? FTP DAO.