Pornhub’s incorporation of a cryptocurrency payment option clearly hasn’t got the viewers as hot as they thought.

The potential of a crypto-porn partnership caused a lot of excitement in early spring of this year. In April, Verge (XVG) announced to great fanfare that it would partner with Pornhub, to provide a crypto payments option for customers of the adult website. Since then there have been numerous stories which have seen porn and crypto partnering up in an attempt to entice viewers; these have included Stormy Daniels’ decision to start rewarding viewers with crypto and a virtual reality porn site beginning to accept Litecoin as payment.

However, whilst the hype was undoubtedly huge, it does not seem to have been the game-changer which some predicted. In correspondence with the tech news site Hardfork, Pornhub reportedly revealed currently less than 1% of purchases made on the site are done so using cryptocurrency.

Much speculation surrounding the launch focussed on the appeal of using privacy-focussed coins such as XVG to pay for porn and predicted a large uptake for the option; the assumption being that people don’t want other people to know they pay for porn. Pornhub.com itself clocked in 28.5 billion visits in 2017, and whilst this does not reveal how much of this total is formed of paying customers, the potential number of customers who would pay in cryptocurrency is likely in the hundreds of millions.

In spite of this lack of uptake, Pornhub has stated that it still sees crypto payments in its future:

“That being said, we expect to see widespread adoption of crypto[currency] and blockchain on our site in the near future.”

This sentiment is reflected in the fact that the site has already expanded its crypto payment options from just Verge, to include TRON and Horizen. The site has also announced a partnership with Pumapay, through which it hopes to add an Ethereum payment option in early 2019.

The reasons behind the so-far lack of uptake for crypto by porn-viewers are unclear but likely centre around the usual problems with this nascent technology: the infrastructure is just not there yet. As is true for even the biggest coins out there, using them as a payments system is still not really convenient at this point in time. This fact is further compounded by the relative obscurity of these coins. For amateurs, coins which aren’t listed on Coinbase can seem unobtainable. Couple this with a shrinking taboo around porn in general and there is probably an arguable case for why the uptake so far has been limited. Whilst there is doubtless a future for crypto payments for porn, as with all things, there is still a way to go yet.

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