web3 is Growing on Me
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Seven days ago, we relaunched Kinkbnb.com to use a web3 wallet and token gating to control access to our website. This is an attempt at a launch post-mortem.
Back in November of 2019, the world was a lot different — but not really. In December we’d been de-platformed from Stripe essentially over pictures of furniture. This has happened constantly to my sex worker friends but I was damned sure I would avoid it — and I couldn’t. It taught me a lesson. I started frantically rewriting KinkBNB to use our bank’s payment processor because we have a great relationship with our bank and I’ve worked for porn companies building payment systems before, albeit in 2002. At the same time, it bugged me because not everyone has access to the skills and tools that I do in my normal day job as an IT consultant. The single mom trying to feed her kid can’t do this sort of thing if her PayPal gets shut down and that is something that nags at my white male privilege something fierce.
Mind you, these were all thoughts and emotions I was struggling with BEFORE the pandemic.
I am an introvert. For this reason, I was very happy during the pandemic. I am fine walking around with my face covered and staying 10 feet away from everyone else. The shift in life also gave me a chance to rethink how I wanted to rebuild KinkBNB. Sometimes you have to recognize those signs that you have to slow down and plan, you know? That’s what I did. We still are not done. To be honest, I had my sincere doubts last week before we launched this rebuild. I wasn’t sure how people would respond to the changes we made, especially the integration with crypto wallets like Metamask. One week on and I feel like my fears were unfounded — but that’s not exactly true. The first day when I mailed my mailing list, I got ten emails excoriating me for the move to web3. The thing that made those fears vanish was the window open with the widget I’d built to get the balance on our token vendor smart contract. Our mailing list from the Before Times is almost at six figures, and ten angry emails versus the tens of people buying into our crazy scheme to remake our site on that first day made the pain of learning all this new stuff worthwhile.
While we are at it, the new KinkBNB is made with the following tools:
