43-Year-Old OnlyFans Founder Passes Away, He Once Added ETH to Company Balance Sheet

Author: Mahe, 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. OnlyFans issued a brief statement saying he “passed away peacefully” and asked the public to respect the privacy of his family.

OnlyFans is a content subscription platform headquartered in London, UK. Creators upload exclusive content, and fans pay monthly subscriptions. While primarily focused on adult content creators, it also covers fitness, music, cooking, and other fields. According to the latest data in 2025, OnlyFans has approximately 377.5 million user accounts, with creator numbers reaching 4.63 million. Currently, OnlyFans is valued at about $18 billion, making it the highest-valued private company among global subscription creator economy platforms.

Radvinsky is a Ukrainian-American who rarely appears publicly but bought a 75% stake in OnlyFans’ parent company in 2018, transforming a small UK-based platform into a cash cow with over $6 billion in adult transaction volume. When he took over OnlyFans in 2018, the platform was just a “paid Instagram” run by Tim Stokely’s family with a £10,000 loan. After his major acquisition, the focus shifted entirely to adult content, with explosive user growth during the pandemic, and in 2024, he took over more than $700 million in dividends.

The outside world knows little about Radvinsky’s stance on cryptocurrencies—he has not publicly endorsed any blockchain but has explored the crypto world.

Purchased millions of dollars worth of ETH, and has donated to Ukrainian DAOs

During his control, OnlyFans quietly launched a small feature in February 2022: support for Ethereum-verified NFTs as profile pictures. The platform explicitly stated this was “the first step in exploring the role of NFTs on the platform.” Creator NFT profile pictures displayed a small Ethereum icon, which could be clicked to view details on OpenSea.

This seemingly minor feature allowed millions of adult creators to directly access crypto assets for the first time.

This move was early. That year, the NFT craze was in full swing, with Twitter launching NFT profile pictures, and OnlyFans quickly followed.

Little known is that OnlyFans’ parent company, Fenix International, also purchased tens of millions of dollars worth of ETH.

According to the company’s financial statements at the end of November 2022, Fenix bought approximately $19.9 million worth of ETH, which was listed as an intangible asset. Due to the 2022 crypto market crash, Ethereum’s price plummeted, and the company recorded an impairment loss of about $8.46 million, adjusting the ETH holdings to approximately $11.4 million.

To date, OnlyFans has not enabled crypto payments; users still rely on credit cards or third-party virtual cards. During Radvinsky’s era, OnlyFans resembled a “traditional finance + adult content” hybrid, with a 20% commission and a remarkably stable cash flow.

During the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022, a group of crypto activists and enthusiasts quickly gathered to support Ukraine.

Their method was auctioning an NFT depicting the Ukrainian flag. In a sale organized by the decentralized autonomous organization Ukraine DAO, 2,258 ETH were raised, worth about $6.79 million at the time.

According to subsequent reports by Decrypt, 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, now valued at $1.079 million.

Zapper data indicates that the only.eth address was created in May 2021. Its wallet currently holds less than $2,000, and the last transaction was three years ago.

However, the true integration of OnlyFans’ DNA into crypto was driven by its founder, Tim Stokely.

In 2016, Stokely founded OnlyFans, and in December 2021, he resigned as CEO, fully shifting his focus. In May 2022, he and former OnlyFans executive RJ Phillips launched Zoop—a Polygon-based NFT trading card platform.

Zoop is entirely “family-friendly”: selling 3D digital collectible cards of celebrities and influencers, allowing users to buy, sell, trade, and collect, with airdrops and benefits. Limited editions emphasize creator revenue sharing. Essentially, Zoop is bringing the “fans pay directly” model of OnlyFans into the Web3 collectibles space.

In April 2025, Zoop, in partnership with HBAR Foundation (the treasury manager of Hedera Hashgraph), submitted a bid to acquire TikTok’s U.S. operations. The core idea was Web3 integration: leveraging Hedera’s scalability to support TikTok’s NFTs, creator payments, governance, and overall token incentive systems, aiming to directly share 80% of ad revenue with creators and users.

Ultimately, due to various reasons, the bid was not finalized. Tim Stokely, having stepped away from the adult empire, brought the core logic into Zoop and Hedera’s TikTok bid, effectively upgrading the “fans pay for content” model into a Web3 version.