Original author: Ma He, Foresight News

On March 23, Leonid Radvinsky, the actual controller of OnlyFans, passed away after a long battle with cancer at the age of 43. A spokesperson for OnlyFans simply stated "peacefully passed away," and urged the public to respect the family's privacy.

OnlyFans is a content subscription platform headquartered in London, UK, where creators upload exclusive content and fans pay monthly subscriptions. It primarily focuses on adult content creators, but also covers fitness, music, cooking, and more. According to the latest data from 2025, OnlyFans users' accounts have stabilized at around 377.5 million, with the number of creators growing to 4.63 million. Currently, OnlyFans has a market valuation of about $18 billion, making it the highest-valued private company in the global subscription-based creator economy platform.

Radvinsky was a Ukrainian-American who rarely appeared in public, but in 2018 he purchased 75% of OnlyFans' parent company, transforming a small platform that started in the UK into a cash cow with an annual transaction volume exceeding $6 billion. When he took over OnlyFans in 2018, the platform was still just a "paid Instagram" that Tim Stokely's family had developed with a £10,000 loan. After Radvinsky's acquisition, the focus was fully set on adult content; during the pandemic, the user base exploded, and in 2024, he took home over $700 million just from dividends.

Little is known about Radvinsky's attitude towards cryptocurrency—he never publicly endorsed any chains, but he had explored the crypto world.

Purchased tens of millions of dollars in ETH and donated to Ukraine DAO

During his control, OnlyFans quietly launched a small feature in February 2022: support for Ethereum-verified NFTs as profile pictures. The platform clearly stated that this was "the first step in exploring the role of NFTs on the platform." Creators' NFT avatars would have a small Ethereum icon, and clicking on it would link to OpenSea for more details.

This feature seemed inconspicuous, yet allowed millions of adult creators to directly access crypto assets for the first time.

This move came early. That year, the NFT craze was at its peak, with Twitter launching NFT avatars and OnlyFans quickly following suit.

What is not widely known is that OnlyFans' parent company, Fenix International, also purchased tens of millions of dollars worth of ETH.

According to the company's financial statement at the end of November 2022, Fenix had purchased approximately $19.9 million worth of ETH, listing it as intangible assets. Due to the cryptocurrency market crash in 2022, the price of Ethereum plummeted, resulting in an impairment loss of about $8.46 million for the company that year, adjusting the value of its ETH holdings to around $11.4 million.

OnlyFans has not yet opened up to crypto payments, as users still rely on credit cards or third-party virtual cards. Under Radvinsky's leadership, OnlyFans resembled a hybrid of "traditional finance + adult content," taking a 20% cut, with cash flow being remarkably stable.

Shifting focus to the period of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022, a group of cryptocurrency activists and enthusiasts quickly rallied to support Ukraine.

Their method was to auction an NFT artwork depicting the Ukrainian flag. In an auction organized by the decentralized autonomous organization "Ukraine DAO," 2,258 Ether was raised, valued at approximately $6.79 million at the time.

According to subsequent reports from Decrypt, the adult site OnlyFans also participated in the donation.

Blockchain tracking platform Etherscan shows that on February 27, an address named only.eth donated 500 ETH to Ukraine DAO, currently valued at $1.079 million.

Zapper data shows that the only.eth address was created in May 2021, and its total wallet value is now less than $2,000, with the last wallet transfer activity occurring three years ago.

However, it was really the platform's founder, Tim Stokely, who brought the OnlyFans gene into crypto.

In 2016, Stokely founded the platform OnlyFans, resigning as CEO in December 2021 to pivot completely. In May 2022, he launched Zoop—a platform for NFT trading cards based on the Polygon chain, with former OnlyFans executive RJ Phillips.

Zoop positions itself as entirely "family-friendly": selling 3D digital collectible cards of celebrities and influencers, where users can buy, sell, trade, and collect, and also receive airdrop benefits. It has limited releases and emphasizes creator revenue sharing. Essentially, Zoop takes OnlyFans' "fan direct payment" model and transitions it to the Web3 collectibles space.

In April 2025, Zoop, in collaboration with HBAR Foundation (the treasury management body of the Hedera chain), submitted a bid for acquiring TikTok's U.S. business. The core of the proposal was to push for Web3: Hedera's scalability would be used to support TikTok's NFTs, creator payments, governance structure, and overall token incentive system, aiming to directly distribute 80% of advertising revenues to creators and users.

In the end, for various reasons, the intended bid did not finalize. Tim Stokely detached from the adult empire but carried the core logic into Zoop and Hedera's TikTok bid, effectively upgrading the "fans pay for content" model to a Web3 version.

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