Jessica Van Meir, a co-founder of the adult creator subscription site MintStars, is leaving the company and putting part of her ownership into a pool meant to pay creators if the business returns money to shareholders.
In a late June email to creators, Van Meir said 20 percent of her shares would be used to create a co-ownership pool for MintStars creators. She said her remaining 3 percent of the company would go to SWOP Behind Bars, a U.S. nonprofit that supports incarcerated sex workers and survivors of sex trafficking.
Van Meir wrote that the move completed her personal goal of launching a company “for and by adult content creators” and that she would step down as a director of MintStars. Van Meir, a Harvard PhD candidate studying the sex workers’ rights movement in Latin America, co-founded MintStars in 2021 with Daniel Sargent. Sargent will remain chief executive.
How the creator stake works
The creator pool will not hand creators ordinary voting stock, according to Van Meir’s description. It will use phantom shares, a cash-based incentive tied to a company’s value or payouts. In plain English: creators would be paid if MintStars is sold or distributes dividends, but they would not receive voting rights or dilute existing equity.
Van Meir told creators the pool would be allocated according to their contributions to the platform. She said MintStars plans to create a points system based on earned revenue, referrals and the number of months a creator has actively used the service.
AVN reported that the points program is expected to launch this month, will count retroactive activity and will come alongside governance changes, including a Creator Advisory Board.
Adult creator platforms usually pay performers for their own subscriptions, tips or sales, while the company keeps the platform upside. MintStars’ plan gives creators a claim tied to the company’s broader financial outcome. That is unusual in a sector where sex workers have helped build audiences for major platforms and then dealt with censorship, payment problems or sudden policy risk.
Why Van Meir is stepping away
Van Meir told creators that criticism of her academic work contributed to her decision. She wrote that anti-sex-work organizations had tried to use her connection to MintStars to challenge the credibility of her PhD research, and said she did not want her company role to interfere with research and activism that could benefit sex worker communities.
Demonia, a financial dominatrix who has used MintStars since 2023, told 404 Media that unstable platforms and online censorship had frustrated her in the past. She said the co-ownership plan gave creators another reason to invest time in MintStars and described cooperative enterprises as healthier places to work.
SWOP Behind Bars also welcomed the donation. A spokesperson told 404 Media that the partnership was part of building an ecosystem “for and by adult industry workers,” and said Van Meir’s donated shares would help the nonprofit better understand and meet workers’ needs.
MintStars processes payments using USDC, a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar. Customers can pay by credit card, and creators can receive fiat payouts. Last month, MintStars announced a partnership with Payy Network. In that announcement, Sargent said adult creators face bank account closures, blocked transactions and delayed earnings, adding that crypto access had not solved privacy or safety because blockchain activity can be public.
The company has pitched blockchain settlement as a way to reduce chargebacks, censorship and banking discrimination, three problems that adult platforms have had to treat as infrastructure risks rather than edge cases.
This story draws on original reporting from 404 Media.
