After apocalyptic levels of hype around the partnership announcement on April 17, the Verge team delivered its highly anticipated news and it was not what most people (myself included) were expecting it to be: Pornhub (technically, MindGeek, but we'll get to that shortly).

Prior to the announcement, the partnership actually leaked out about an hour beforehand, with Pornhub ironically prematurely releasing the news in the form of a well-produced promotional video coinciding with the news.

The announcement was met with an immediate sell-off and at the time of writing this, Verge is down 23%. Many stuck to the trading mantra of, "Buy the rumour, sell the news" and some sold the news because it wasn't the announcement they were expecting.

There were a few things wrong with this situation, and a few unavoidable things like market reception of the news. It's clear that Justin and the Verge team overstated the importance of the announcement.

It's clear that Verge desperately needs a marketing team. This isn't the first time that Verge has hyped up news only for things to go completely sour. The Verge team really needs a marketing team who can not only execute the lead-up, but also the announcement and post-announcement.

Besides the news being leaked by Pornhub early, there was also close to 10 minutes silence from the Verge team (not helped by a Twitter outage, but still) after the 10 am EST deadline. This should have been a much more exciting moment, except investors were met with the harsh reality of a sell-off so fast, that Binance was lagging terribly trying to keep up.

I truly believe that the Verge team announcing an announcement was a bad move on their part, it allowed pump and dumpers to manipulate the price and negatively affect true hodlers and everyday investors who have bought into XVG. In future, Justin and co should just come out guns blazing and not make announcements.

We knew the sell-off was coming

Sentiment towards Verge has been quite low outside of the #vergefam community for some time now, many were saying they were going to dump/sell their Verge tokens when the news drops (all over Twitter and Reddit) and many followed through with that.

It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who did their research that people invested in the lead-up expecting huge gains, as well as some disgruntled heavy bagholders who bought in at the all-time-high in the mid twenty cent range and were looking for a way out. Once the profit takers have sold and taken their profits/losses, then you'll see Verge start to climb back up.

People seriously need to get some perspective on this news, because it means more than many seem to realise it means, when you look at this announcement holistically it's hugely positive.

Here is your perspective...

The partnership is really with MindGeek

Pornhub is an online property owned by a company called MindGeek, it is a brand owned by an umbrella corporation who controls 85% of adult-related content online. So while Pornhub is arguably the biggest brand in the MindGeek portfolio to adopt XVG, the partnership is technically with MindGeek.

Think about it, imagine a cryptocurrency project announced they were partnering with Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse is a character owned by Disney, so while Mickey Mouse might be the focus, technically Mickey Mouse equals Disney.

Once you make the correlation and realise this is more than one online brand, your perspective on the announcement should be changed.

Just wait until MindGeek starts rolling Verge out to its other online brands other than Pornhub, we've already seen Brazzers adopt it and once other sites start accepting it you're going to see some seriously huge adoption take place. This is unprecendented for an altcoin, or a cryptocurrency coin in general.

Pornhub is MASSIVE

In 2017, Pornhub had 28.5 billion visitors for the year at an average of 81 million daily average visitors. They had a total of 24.7 billion searches performed, which equates to 50,000 searches per minute.

I couldn't find any up-to-date comparative metrics for Amazon, but I did find a post from 2012 on Mashable which quotes Amazon receiving 80 million people in monthly visitors. In one day of traffic in 2017, Pornhub had more visitors than Amazon in a month back in 2012.

Keep in mind the announcement mentions Pornhub and while it's huge news, the company that owns the site (MindGeek) is the bigger picture to be looking at here. MindGeek has the monopoly for online adult content, so this announcement is bigger than many people seem to realise.

Market sentiment !== true value.

Cryptocurrency legitimised

When Satoshi Nakamoto concocted Bitcoin, he/she/they envisioned a world where Bitcoin would replace fiat currency as the defacto online transaction currency. Sadly, Satoshi's vision never came to be as Bitcoin is perceived to be a coin that you hodl, not spend. Bitcoin has become the digital equivalent of gold or silver, an asset.

Many companies over the years like Valve have tried adopting Bitcoin to no avail as its price volatility and scaling issues makes it harder to adopt as an accepted currency. No altcoin has ever achieved this kind of adoption (to my knowledge) with a partner this big.

The news that the worlds largest porn site is accepting Verge as payment is huge news, especially considering that no other cryptocurrency is accepted by the site at the moment. It is a huge show of confidence on Pornhub's part to adopt Verge as a currency.

This announcement isn't just good news for Verge, it's good news for cryptocurrency as a whole. If Pornhub is willing to take the risk of adopting an emerging technology, it might prompt other online sites to take the plunge and adopt it as well.

This is the door being "kicked in"

Understandably investors who bought into Justin's hype that Verge would become a top three cryptocurrency by market cap are feeling disappointed right now given the price of Verge has gone the complete opposite direction and is sitting at levels we saw weeks ago.

The adoption of Verge by Pornhub is just the beginning. This is a portfolio piece for the Verge team and means that Justin and Verge can go to other companies and use this announcement as leverage for getting other companies to adopt Verge as a transactional currency.

If you've been in crypto for a while it's easy to lose your perspective on things and the fact that cryptocurrency is still being met with caution from governments and businesses. Cryptocurrencies have yet to be legitimised or proven to have use outside of being speculative assets, this is a step in the right direction.

Legitimacy and security

When it comes to accessing online adult content, many ideally would prefer discretion and up until this news, there was no true way for anyone to purchase adult content online without fear of it showing up on a bank or credit card statement.

The online porn industry also has a bad reputation when it comes to charging customers for content through misleading claims on the true cost of things, this could be a two way street to legitimising cryptocurrency and paying for online porn.

Paying with cryptocurrency offers two immediate consumer-friendly perks: security and privacy. No transaction log with your name and postal address on it and the protection of not being charged excessive amounts in false free trials and hidden credit card costs for paying for pornography.

This means that people who otherwise were worried about porn sites showing up on bank statements can now purchase porn with almost true secrecy. It also means that the consumer chooses to make a transaction and no provider can continuously make hidden charges because there is no credit card and transactions are user-initiated.

The adoption of cryptocurrency could mean more people end up paying for porn instead of happily consuming ad-laden free pornography. It's a win for consumers and undoubtedly, it's a win for the adult industry who has struggled in the face of piracy and the internet.

A whole new market

If you hang around in cryptocurrency communities on Reddit, Discord or Twitter, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that this is an emerging market and many do not know about cryptocurrencies or have heard about them, but never had a reason to take the plunge (or know how to).

The announcement has only just been made, but we are already seeing an aggressive marketing strategy at work here. All major news publications are writing about this partnership, the Verge logo is absolutely everywhere, Youtube promotional videos, jackets, armoured vans covered in the Verge logo, billboards and we are literally only just 12 hours from the announcement having been made.

From all of this we can expect that there will be an influx of new investors into Verge, some with the intention of paying for Pornhub Premium and others genuinely curious about a cryptocurrency promising privacy. It might be hard to see the current low price as a good thing, but a lower price means more people will be willing to buy XVG tokens at this accessible price point.

Conclusion

I legitimately think despite the price dropping 23% that this is a HUGE step forward for Verge and cryptocurrencies in general. We need more positive partnerships and huge companies like MindGeek taking the plunge and adopting cryptocurrencies if we want this market to grow and be accepted as a legitimate alternative to fiat currency and credit cards.

I do think that the Verge team should have handled the lead-up and announcement a lot better than they did, but don't let the poor execution get in the way of a much larger story.

Cryptocurrency needs to grow up and out of its 12 year old boy phase and obsession with lambos and moons. This is how you do it, show there is real-world use for things and change the conversation away from, "Cryptocurrency is used by criminals to avoid tax and buy drugs"