A 43-year-old billionaire has passed away; his company, OnlyFans, had explored the crypto world.

Written by: Mach, Foresight News

On March 23, Leonid Radvinsky, the de facto controller of OnlyFans, passed away at the age of 43 after a long battle with cancer. A spokesperson for OnlyFans only said "passed away peacefully" and asked the public to respect the privacy of his family.

OnlyFans is a London-based content subscription platform where creators upload exclusive content, and fans subscribe monthly. While primarily focused on adult content creators, it also covers fitness, music, cooking, and other areas. According to the latest data from 2025, OnlyFans has a stable user base of approximately 377.5 million, with the number of creators growing to 4.63 million. Currently, OnlyFans is valued at approximately $18 billion, making it the highest-valued privately held company in the global subscription-based creator economy.

Radvinsky, a Ukrainian-American, rarely makes public appearances, yet in 2018 he acquired a 75% stake in OnlyFans' parent company, transforming a small UK-based platform into a cash cow with over $6 billion in annual transaction volume. When he took over OnlyFans in 2018, the platform was merely a "paid Instagram" cobbled together by Tim Stokely and his family with a mere £10,000 loan. After Radvinsky's major acquisition, he completely shifted the focus to adult content, resulting in explosive user growth during the pandemic, and in 2024 alone, he received over $700 million in dividends.

Little is known about Radvinsky’s stance on crypto – he has not publicly endorsed any blockchain, but he has explored the crypto world.

He has purchased tens of millions of dollars worth of ETH and has also donated to the Ukrainian DAO.

During his tenure, OnlyFans quietly launched a small feature in February 2022: supporting Ethereum-verified NFTs as avatars. The platform explicitly 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, which, when clicked, would take them to OpenSea for more details.

This seemingly insignificant feature has given millions of adult creators direct access to crypto assets for the first time.

This move was made early. That year, the NFT craze was at its peak, Twitter launched NFT avatars, and OnlyFans quickly followed suit.

What is little known is that Fenix ​​International, the parent company of OnlyFans, also purchased tens of millions of dollars worth of ETH.

According to the company's financial statements at the end of November 2022, Fenix ​​purchased a total of approximately $19.9 million worth of ETH and classified it as intangible assets. Due to the cryptocurrency market crash in 2022 and the sharp drop in the price of Ethereum, the company recorded an impairment loss of approximately $8.46 million that year, adjusting the value of its ETH holdings to approximately $11.4 million.

The OnlyFans platform has not yet enabled encrypted payments; users still rely on credit cards or third-party virtual cards. During Radvinsky's era, OnlyFans was more like a hybrid of "traditional finance + adult content," taking a 20% cut and maintaining an incredibly stable cash flow.

Turning our attention to the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022, a group of cryptocurrency activists and enthusiasts quickly rallied in support of Ukraine.

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

According to a subsequent report by Decrypt, the adult website OnlyFans also participated in the donation.

According to blockchain tracking platform Etherscan, on February 27, an address named only.eth donated 500 ETH to the Ukraine DAO, now worth $1.079 million.

According to Zapper data, the only.eth address was created in May 2021, and its current total wallet value is less than $2,000. The last wallet transfer activity was 3 years ago.

However, it was its founder, Tim Stokely, who truly brought the OnlyFans DNA into crypto.

In 2016, Stokely founded the platform OnlyFans, and in December 2021, he resigned as CEO, making a complete career change. In May 2022, he and former OnlyFans executive RJ Phillips launched Zoop—an NFT trading card platform based on the Polygon blockchain.

Zoop positions itself as completely "family-friendly": selling 3D digital collectible cards featuring celebrities and influencers, which users can buy, sell, trade, and collect, and even receive airdrop rewards. It features limited releases and emphasizes revenue sharing for creators. Essentially, Zoop brings OnlyFans' "direct payment to fans" model to the Web3 collectibles market.

In April 2025, Zoop, in conjunction with the HBAR Foundation (the treasury manager of the Hedera blockchain), submitted a bid to acquire TikTok's US operations. The core of the proposal was Web3 integration: Hedera's scalability would be used to support TikTok's NFTs, creator payments, governance structure, and overall token incentive system, with the goal of directly distributing 80% of advertising revenue to creators and users.

Ultimately, for various reasons, the intended bid did not go through. Tim Stokely withdrew from the adult entertainment industry, but brought his core logic to the bidding for TikTok with Zoop and Hedera, essentially upgrading the "fans pay for content" model to a Web3 version.