Hello Insight Monitor subscribers, and welcome to another edition of our newsletter where we look at extremist financing. This week, we’re doing something a little different, and looking at a platform and how it is financed, its corporate structure, and opportunities for disruption. This is particularly relevant in the lead up to US elections, and in a growing climate of political extremism. Let’s get into it.
~Jess
Entropy is a Canadian livestreaming service and donation platform. It garnered significant recognition between 2019 and 2021 for providing a payment platform to influential extremists who had been demonetized from larger platforms, including prominent white nationalist Nick Fuentes. Today, it is used by dozens of extremist livestreamers and facilitates donations from potentially thousands of users.
Entropy’s Network
Entropy was launched in 2019 by Chthonic Software, a tech company co-founded by David John Bell, Emmanuel Constantinidis, and Rachel Constantinidis in Calgary, Alberta. In the website’s first two years, it attracted significant influential far-right personalities as livestreamers (live video bloggers), including Canadian white Nationalist Stefan Molyneux, British neo-Nazi Mark Collett, and — most notably — US white nationalist Nick Fuentes.
In 2021, Entropy’s owners moved to Türkiye. While the platform’s management has become more secretive in recent years, and have ceased all public marketing, the website appears to still be a thriving platform among white supremacist and neo-Nazi streamers in Canada and the US. The size of Entropy’s channels and user base is difficult to quantify due to the website’s user interface. The site only displays a limited number of channels in any category, and there is no method to browse accounts. However, the site’s most-subscribed channel has over 3500 subscribers.1
While Entropy took steps throughout 2019 and 2020 to find and promote emerging far-right talent, it did not obtain or maintain exclusive streaming rights from its streamers. For example, Entropy’s most subscribed livestreamers are US neo-Nazi comedian and ex-Infowars host Owen Benjamin, Canadian white supremacist Jeremy Mackenzie, Nick Fuentes, and US antisemitic conspiracy theorist Ryan Dawson, respectively.2 Benjamin and Dawson both promote their livestreaming accounts with competitors’ platforms (Odyssey and Rumble) on their own websites, but neither include links to their Entropy streams on the same pages.3 In fact, Owen Benjamin — Entropy’s biggest channel — promotes social media accounts for 12 different platforms on his website, but his Entropy account is not one of them. Likewise, Fuentes’ primary streaming channel is on his own brand’s platform.
Financing Through Entropy
How Entropy is Used
Entropy has a relatively simple financial workflow. According to Entropy’s materials for livestreamers, the site asks streamers for their preferred method of payment, and an email address to receive invoices. However, the materials do not publicly specify which payment options Entropy accommodates. Entropy promises users that it does not store streamers’ financial information and claims it uses encryption for payments:
“When making a payment you authorize our payment processor to create an encrypted card token which we use to create a charge. We do not have access to your card details nor can we decrypt the token. When a charge is made we store information such as, but not limited to, amount, currency, sender, and receiver.”
While Entropy’s payment process processors are not visible to viewers, Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) reported that the site used Stripe before developing their own payment processing service. Chthonic’s Emmanuel Constantinidis told Entropy users on a Discord server that the service was developed after Stripe pressured Entropy to stop facilitating payments to Nick Fuentes.
Entropy’s domain is currently registered by the US-based ICANN domain registration service Namecheap.com.
In archived web pages retrieved by the SPLC, Entropy’s own materials, and interviews with Chthonic, Entropy claims to take 15% from paid interactions and promises no hidden fees to both streamers and viewers who donate. Entropy’s main services are paid chats that incentivize donations through increased interactivity with streamers. A common example is Youtube’s “Super Chats,” which Entropy has mimicked on their platform. Streamers often incentivize paid chat donations by promising to perform specific actions or discuss specific topics if people pay for Super Chats.
Entropy pays out streamers their 85% share of paid chat funds once per month. If payments do not exceed $100, they claim they move the payout to the next month, and so on, until a streamer is set to receive $100 in total.
Why Entropy is Used
Entropy provides many influential streamers with a financing solution that is relatively simple when compared to competing platforms. Entropy’s branding has largely focused on transparent pricing models, boasting that both streamers and donors face no hidden fees in their transactions on the website.4 This positions Entropy as a much more affordable alternative for demonetized streamers than starting their own streaming platforms, for example Alex Jones’s Banned Video.
Entropy’s personability as a brand and its genuine far-right politics could also be factors in livestreamers’ decisions to use the website. As a small company, Chthonic used to frequently promote relatively small livestreamer’s channels on its own social media accounts. Much like Gab, an antisemitic social media platform favoured by Entropy’s ownership and users, Entropy’s ownership regularly engaged in far-right narratives and memes on social media. Entropy owner Rachel Constantinidis also participated in right-wing political streams.5
However, this part of Entropy’s branding and promotion appears to have ceased. Entropy’s account on Gab has not posted since 2021, and the Entropy developers’ current Twitter account has not posted since 2023, while Chthonic’s Twitter account has been deactivated.6
Entropy’s greatest brand proposition to streamers and viewers is most likely Chthonic’s dedication that its streamers can remain monetized, even when faced with external pressure. The website has even monetized Unite The Right organizer Robert Ray when he was a fugitive from the law. Furthermore, in 2021, when Entropy was pressured by Stripe to demonetize Nick Fuentes, Chthonic created a new platform for Fuentes to avoid demonetization.
However, Entropy’s own terms and services are more limiting than some other internet platforms used by right-wing extremists. The website does not allow pornography, impersonation, or “revealing private information about someone with the intention of causing them harm.”7
Evidently, Chthonic’s loyalty to its streamers has not prevented them from cultivating larger audiences on competing platforms. Fuentes himself has since launched his own streaming platform, CozyTV, which he has promoted as an “anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-Black, antisemitic” streaming alternative.
An additional weakness in Entropy’s service is that the streaming quality is relatively poor, with lag being a common occurrence.
Entropy’s Finances
As a small, private company, it is difficult to gauge the costs incurred by Chthonic Software to build and maintain Entropy. Additionally, it is unclear if, or how, Entropy is marketed other than through extremist word of mouth. While Entropy could have spent money on social media marketing between 2019 and 2021, Chthonic seldom, if ever, publicly promotes Entropy today.
Prior to their move to Türkiye, Entropy’s owners appeared to be involved in development and marketing of Entropy, which could have reduced contracting costs for the company. Rachel Constantinidis often acted as the face of Entropy, at times appearing in videos promoting the platform posted to video platforms like Bitchute and Youtube.8 These videos had minimal production value, with much of the footage appearing as Constantinidis speaking to a webcam, and as such likely did not incur significant costs for Entropy.
The Entropy website is a .live domain registered through Arizona-based domain provider NameCheap.com. Other domains with similar names to Entropy’s website drastically range in costs, with many costing less than $10 per year and others costing several hundred.
While Chthonic software does not currently appear to operate a website other than Entropy, Entropy’s contact information includes emails registered to a second domain, which records indicate is also registered through NameCheap.com.
Because Entropy claims that no additional fees are ever incurred by its users, its ownership likely incur wire transfer fees to pay out the streamers (a fairly minor cost for the business).
Entropy does not appear to incur contracting costs for website maintenance or customer service. Instead, Chthonic’s owners’ personal emails are listed for troubleshooting support.9
A Canadian company but an international footprint
As of the time of writing, Entropy’s parent company Chthonic Software appears to still be registered as a company in Alberta. However, its business address has not been updated since before its owners moved to Türkiye. Businesses registered in Canada usually have a bank account at a Canadian financial institution; however, Chthonic might also have opened a bank account in Türkiye through which it processes its payments.
Türkiye is widely recognized for its leniency on terrorism financing. As such, it is unlikely that Entropy’s owners, who primarily provide financing to non-violent extremists, would face legal consequence from Turkish authorities. Further, Türkiye is preoccupied with other forms of terrorism and extremism, and is unlikely to view this activity as a threat to its security or worth taking action against. The situation could be further complicated by the fact that Entropy’s domain and the domain that Chthonic’s owners’ email addresses use are both registered to an address in Reykjavik, Iceland. However, this address has not been verified.
Conversely, deplatforming by other tech companies has hindered Entropy’s operations in the past. As the SPLC reported, Emmanuel Constantinidis claims Entropy was pressured by Stripe (a service that has been criticized for providing services to far-right extremists in the past) to demonetize Nick Fuentes. The site’s accompanying Google Chrome application also appears to have been removed from Google’s app platform. However, it is possible that Google has not fully deplatformed Entropy. Entropy has boasted integration with Youtube (owned by Google) and Twitch for simultaneous streaming capabilities since 2019.10 Login pages on Entropy and the website’s FAQ sections indicate that it is still integrated with both services, as well as Rumble, Odyssey, Cozy, and DLive.11
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Entropy Homepage. Entropy, n.d. URL censored.
Entropy Homepage. URL censored.
Owen Benjamin, “Social Media Channels,” Owen Benjamin, n.d. URL censored.; Ryan Dawson, “Ryan Dawson’s Anti-Neocon Report,” ANCReport, n.d. URL censored.
“Policies & Terms of Service.”; “Getting Started,” Entropy, n.d. URL censored.
“About to go live with [censored] to talk about our journey into Orthodoxy” Rachel Constantinidis. Twitter. March 22, 2019; “It was awesome to have you call in to my stream! Made me feel like a radio show host! Rachel Constantinidis. Twitter. March 18, 2019. URL censored.
“@ChthonicTeam,” n.d. Twitter. URL censored.
“Policies & Terms of Service,” Entropy, n.d. URL censored.
“Rachel Constantinidis,” Youtube, n.d. URL censored.
“Contact,” Entropy, n.d. URL censored.
Episode 1 with Tech Start up Chthonic Software, 2019. Andrea With Bangs. Youtube. URL censored.
“Policies & Terms of Service,” Entropy, n.d. URL censored.
Thanks for this, and for all the other important knowledge & insight you provide!