“One of the ways traffickers control victims is by controlling their finances,” says Jessica Van Meir, founder of MintStars, an adult-friendly NFT subscription platform, and a PhD candidate at Harvard specializing in women's informal labor. “The irony is that banks exclude sex workers largely for fear of liability for sex trafficking, but by discriminating against sex workers, they put them at higher risk of sex trafficking.”

Even if the friend or spouse is well-meaning, says Stabile, “you’re handing someone else control of your financial life—and that’s tremendously dangerous.”

The idea that crypto might be used to address these issues was intuitive to sex workers from early on. Provided they could navigate the technical frictions associated with receiving crypto payments and managing a crypto wallet, they could transact with clients directly, bypassing both the hostile banking system and the fees levied by large platforms. The irreversible nature of crypto transactions, meanwhile, protected against another common problem: chargebacks, a process whereby a payment is rescinded after a dispute is raised by a client with their card provider, often without cause and after material has already been received.

Knox began to accept crypto in 2014, only five years after bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency, was created. Whenever she was performing in a live cam room, Knox took to holding up a QR code through which people could tip her in crypto.

Liara Roux, who began working as an escort roughly a decade ago, before later moving into pornography, began to accept crypto payments in 2015 at the request of clients. Initially, she would cash out into dollars immediately, but when SESTA and FOSTA came into effect—after which many adult-friendly advertising sites could no longer accept regular money—she began to pay for ads with crypto too. “By and large, crypto is useful for people that aren’t being taken care of properly by the government,” says Roux. “For sex workers, who aren’t well-served by banks, it becomes a useful option.”

Others were pushed toward crypto by external events. For Rae, it was OnlyFans’ flirtation with a ban on adult content. For some, it was a block imposed by Mastercard and Visa on Pornhub, one of the world’s largest porn websites, in 2020, following a New York Times investigation that found it to be “infested with rape videos.” Data collected by Sex Work CEO, an online portal featuring resources for sex workers, suggests at least a third of sex workers now accept crypto payments.

But for all crypto’s promise as a means of dancing around the banking system, sex workers are finding the limits of its utility: Although sending and receiving crypto payments is relatively simple, converting it into dollars is sometimes not.

The typical method is to transfer crypto to an exchange, where earnings are converted into regular money, which is then withdrawn to a bank account (assuming it hasn’t been closed). But sex workers are sometimes banned from crypto exchanges too, albeit less frequently, leaving them stranded with a form of money they cannot use to pay rent or buy goods.