La Cryptiana

🇪🇺 EU FACES FERTILITY CRISIS: BIRTHS HIT RECORD LOW For the first time since 1960, the EU’s live births dropped below 4 million, with just 3.88 million babies born in 2022. The EU’s average fertility rate is now 1.46, well below the global average of 2.27. Malta (1.08), Spain (1.16), Italy (1.24), Greece (1.32), and Cyprus (1.37) have the lowest fertility rates in Europe. Live births have plunged from 5.1 million in 1990 to this record low. Source: Euronews

As many of you know, we will be shutting down with a heavy heart after several rocky months of trying to get WishTender fully back up and running. WHAT HAPPENED It has been an immense struggle with ups, and mostly downs, since we were kicked off of Stripe. Few services compared to Stripe's technical abilities. We stayed in beta to try to solve issues such as backup processors shutting down, functional payment issues, compliance issues, and limiting bad actors. In the last few days before closing, WishTender was targeted by card testers. Many of the card testers attacked without trying to profit financially, which is highly unusual. Most card testers want to make money. This tells us the attacker’s motive was to harm WishTender irreparably. Unfortunately, the attacks happened while we were more susceptible, and our resources and efforts to combat them were not good enough. Our new payment orchestration fraud tools struggled to detect stolen cards. We kept adding new measures, but the testers found a way around. We finally thought we had it figured out, but it was too late. First, it caused issues with Visa. We felt we could work through the Visa issues, but we were informed it created an existential issue for all payments. As hard as we tried, we could not solve this with the resources we had at our disposal. We feel our resources are too thin to keep going. We have never had investors. It’s only been us and our team trying to make things work. A WORD FROM DASH I hope to speak more openly soon about everything that transpired over our journey. We need some time to handle what is going on. I am beyond saddened that WishTender is done, but I truly enjoyed building a product that helped the adult creator community for the short time it did. We launched three years ago as the first cash wishlist, and your input helped us improve this concept over time. I know so many of you by name and found great joy in joining the community. I sincerely hope to keep in touch with the users who helped us build. I will miss the glory days of Friday Findom memes, making fun of refund subs, Steve the Spider, and the hilarious comments you posted on all our tweets. I will miss the bizarre copycats that popped up and accidentally left the name “WishTender” in their copy and how you all made fun of them. I will miss your impressive ability to get gifts from people who hardly knew you just by sending them a picture of your middle finger. Many of you helped us build WishTender into what it became. I’m hopeful that the changes we made in the industry will continue to inspire other companies to put creators first. But I also learned why this is rare. It’s a huge challenge. Ultimately, we missed the mark, too. This is a harsh industry. From financial discrimination to bad actors and lack of tools and funding, I completely understand why it is so rare to build as openly and fairly as we strived to do. It became more challenging for us over time. WHAT’S NEXT For those in our beta program, if you have yet to initiate your last payout, please ensure your payouts are finalized as soon as possible and keep reading our updates in your payment dashboard. Please get in touch with our support chat on our site if you need help. For users who did not participate in our beta program, you do not need to take any action. Again, we hope to share more about everything that happened, but we are currently prioritizing finalizing beta tester payouts. Thank you for being a part of WishTender’s community and our journey. 💛💙