On 28th January 2020, Newsweek compiled a report about how porn stars are being forced to turn to cryptocurrencies after being shunned by shy bankers and Silicon Valley fintech companies for their “dirty little secret” types of services.

Stereotyping and stigmatization of adult film producers and stars limit or completely cut off their access to advertising platforms, business loans, court appeals and make them prey to exploitation from corporate payment processors.

Two months after PayPal abruptly withdrew their services from Pornhub and hurting a lot of performers who couldn’t get their payments, Tether has now stepped up to offer fee-less and non-volatile payment options to Pornhub.

The Porn Industry Is Pushing For More Recognition, Less Stigmatization

During the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas, the Vice President of sales at SpankChain adult payment platform and former adult entertainer at MyFreeCams.com Allie Eve Knox said that adult entertainers face social, financial and cultural alienation:

“Sponsored ads; third-party companies would never put my ad up on Facebook to drive people to a product.”

The plight of the porn industry, which has been interested in crypto adoption for a while now, is signified by the fact that prominent payments services provider PayPal recently backed out of processing payments for top Canadian site Pornhub.

The Director of Corporate Affairs at a PayPal Justin Higgs, vaguely hinted legal and moral grounds for the firm’s decision:

“We cannot comment on specific cases, but our decision on account holds, limitations, or other actions may be based on the management of risk and other factors in order to protect both buyers and sellers. PayPal’s Acceptable User Policy allows for the sale of certain types of adult products and content to account holders who are over the age of 18.”

The “High-Risk” Label on the Adult Industry Costs Entertainers Their Hard-Earned Profits

Knox, now an ardent advocate of crypto in the porn industry, said that the high-risk label in the porn industry is damaging because it leaves performers to fight for scraps as their profits, despite having millions of followers on social media platforms.

Performers carry the burden of crippling processing fees and chargebacks from credit cards, which take between 10 to 15% and a much bigger percentage for the websites.

“The cams sites would take 50 percent, but I was driving all the traffic, I was doing all the marketing, and I was bringing all the people in, to basically just use them as a payment processor.”

Cryptocurrency Has So Far Not Done Enough for the Porn Industry

Knox feels that the anonymous nature of cryptocurrencies is perfect for protecting the privacy of their clients. Combine this with cheap and fast transactions, and the porn industry is potentially looking to push its agenda to the mainstream corporate space.

However, she feels that the bitcoin community has not done enough to push more people to have bitcoin wallets, and she hopes that Facebook will turn things around with the launch of Libra.

The remarks seem to be supported by the fact the despite Pornhub having available crypto-payment options since august 2018, after their partnership with PumaPay, two years down the line, Tether is the only other cryptocurrency that has stepped up to counteract the deficit.

