LONDON — Premium fan site MintStars has concluded its pre-seed funding round.
According to the London-based startup, it raised $600,000 from blockchain company Polygon Labs and adult crypto company SpankChain.
MintStars, which launched in beta in January and offers an NFT subscription platform, was incubated with the Harvard Innovation Labs and promotes “a more inclusive alternative to other platforms, offering lower fees, using crypto-based payments to protect creators from financial exclusion and enabling creators to earn money from fans reselling their content.”
Co-founder Jessica Van Meir, a PhD student at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government researching sex workers’ rights, previously worked for a feminist law firm supporting victims of image-based sexual abuse and sex trafficking. Through this work, Van Meir observed that online sex workers struggle with having their images stolen, financial discrimination from banks and payment processors, and deplatforming on social media.
“Sex workers should have the same access to the internet as everyone else, without having to pay extortionate fees due to payment processors discriminating against them,” Van Meir said. “We built MintStars for all creators who make a living off their bodies, be they models, sex workers or dancers, because we believe in consent and bodily autonomy.”
MintStars enables creators to monetize their content through subscriptions and marketplace sales and allows fans to earn money by promoting creators. Fans can collect and resell exclusive content to other fans on the MintStars marketplace, with royalties paid back to the original creator.
MintStars charges fans a 5% fee, with creators paying nothing. Payments on the platform are processed in USDC, a stablecoin equivalent to the dollar, so creators are protected from financial discrimination, chargebacks and delayed payouts.
CEO Daniel Sargent explained that although people associate NFTs with “gatekept communities and outrageously expensive cartoon jpegs,” MintStars aims to exploit their real positive potential.
"We’re taking the same technology and giving it purpose to solve the real problems creators face, without requiring any crypto knowledge to use the platform," said Sargent.
For more information, visit MintStars.com.
