PayPal terminates account of web hosting service Epik, home to right-wing sites like the Proud Boys domain and Gab; source says over Epik's digital currency
PayPal, Hunter Biden, Bloomberg News, and several Avengers were targeted in a series of unhinged open letters from Epik after PayPal terminated its account.
Context & Ripple Effects
PayPal has spent three years systematically cutting the far right off from its payment rails: the 2017 suspensions of high-profile alt-right figures, the Infowars ban in 2018, the Proud Boys and Tommy Robinson account cancellations that November, and the post-Pittsburgh suspension of Gab alongside Stripe and Joyent. What makes this round different is the target: Epik is not a speaker but the hosting provider those speakers retreated to, meaning PayPal is now severing infrastructure rather than individual accounts.
The stated reason also breaks the pattern — sources say the termination was over Epik's digital currency, not its client list, which lets PayPal frame this as financial-risk enforcement while Epik reads it as another front in the same campaign. Epik's response, a series of open letters aimed at PayPal, Hunter Biden, Bloomberg News and several Avengers, signals it intends to fight in public rather than quietly re-route.
First-order effects
- Epik loses PayPal processing outright, and every right-wing service it hosts — Gab, the Proud Boys' domain operations — loses a mainstream payment option at the checkout page in one stroke.
Second-order effects
- Other processors and banks now face the same binary choice Square, Chase and PayPal confronted over 1776.shop: keep serving Epik and absorb reputational exposure, or push its commerce further into cryptocurrency, which is exactly where Epik was already building.
Third-order effects
- If payment networks keep enforcing content boundaries through terms-of-service and risk rules rather than published moderation policies, the fringe web's business model structurally migrates toward self-issued digital currencies — making the processor, not the platform, the decisive gatekeeper.
The trend: Payment processors are becoming the de facto moderators of the internet's edges, with each termination pushing the deplatformed economy closer to crypto rails they cannot touch.