Pornhub is the adult entertainment giant, founded in 2007. It has announced that it starts accepting payments in anonymous cryptocurrency Verge (XVG), a rebranded version of Dogecoindark.
What this means, users are having the option to pay for their premium subscription without having to enter their credit card details, leaving no trails.
"Here at Pornhub, we’re all about convenience and security, which makes cryptocurrency an attractive form of payment for us," said the company's VP Corey Price.
And according to cryptocurrency Verge founder Justin Sunerok, the partnership "represents an enormous market with a global reach that will compete with fiat currencies. It’s huge for Verge and we’re extremely excited to finally be able to announce it."
Pornhub has been testing the payment system internally, and had experienced no problems.
Previously, Verge has been teasing a mysterious partner for about a month. It had asked users to donate $3 million worth of XVG to reveal a "potential partnership." At that time, the fundraising appeal said that it was thrilled to announce the efforts to establish a large cryptocurrency collaboration, and it needed helped to accelerate the crowdfunding process to reach its target goal.
When it was later revealed that Verge's partner is Pornhub, Verge said that the $3 million goes to fun the integration of the technology to Pornhub's payment gateway system, marketing, as well as hardware wallet integrations for Ledger and Trezor. The integration is also available on Pornhub's partner websites.
"History has proven that the adult entertainment industry plays a critical role in adoption for innovative technology. We saw that with VHS, Beta Max, credit card payment icons and, most recently, VR goggles. We expect to see widespread adoption of crypto and blockchain in short order," said Price.
"We’ve been looking at crypto for quite some time and, while overall adoption is relatively low, we think it has gained enough steam for us to penetrate the market," he continued, adding that Pornhub’s partner sites did accept limited cryptocurrencies when Bitcoin had just emerged as a digital currency. And also, Pornhub wasn’t one of the sites to include cryptocurrency as a payment method at that time.
Pornhub promoted the partnership with a YouTube video, titled “The Future Has Cum,” of a futuristic dialogue in the year 2077 between a grandfather and his grandson about how Verge became the currency of the world:
In January 2020, Pornhub added Tether as its second cryptocurrency payment method, two months after the online payment service PayPal dropped its support on the site.
According to Pornhub‘s blog, its content creators can use the cryptocurrency wallet TRONlink.
PayPal in dropping its support was reportedly affecting hundreds of thousands of Pornhub users who relied on the online payments system to transfer money generated on the site into their personal bank accounts.
“Since PayPal’s decision to stop payouts to thousands of Models two months ago, we’ve been hustling to...offer you more options," said Pornhub, adding that USDT transactions can take place “within a few seconds” and that there are "no fees."
Justin Sun, CEO of TRON, praised Pornhub’s decision to add USDT via TRONLink, saying that it is “a brilliant way to support the victims of centralized payment platforms like PayPal.”