PayPal Drops Pornhub and the Crypto Community Rises to Fill the Gap

• PayPal suspends services for Pornhub.
• Over a hundred thousand pornographic actors are now cut off.
• Cryptocurrencies could thrive as a censorship-resistant payment method.

In a drastic move, PayPal suspended its services to the world’s largest free pornographic site, Pornhub. Although the reasoning behind it is unknown, this could be an opportunity to show the intrinsic value that cryptocurrencies have.

Traditional Services Without Censorship Resistance

PayPal’s decision to stop payouts to over a hundred thousand pornographic performers puts into perspective which is censorship resistance. With bitcoin, for instance, individuals can transfer value without fear of third party interference. But, with centralized online payment systems, such as PayPal, censorship is an omnipresent threat.

Pornhub stated:

We are all devastated by PayPal’s decision to stop payouts to over a hundred thousand performers who rely on them for their livelihoods.

Cryptocurrencies are the Solution

The way PayPal suspended its services to Purnhub led Changpeng Zhao, CEO at the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance, to believe that it could be a very good opportunity for cryptocurrencies to thrive as one of the main payment methods on the site.

There’s a precedent to the rallying call. Pornhub began accepting Verge (XVG) as a form of payment in April 2018. The idea was to leverage on the anonymous and privacy-centric nature of digital assets, according to Corey Price, Vice President at Pornhub.

Price said:

Decentralized payment systems have continued to grow in popularity, and cryptocurrency adoption is exploding across a broad economic spectrum. Today, cryptocurrencies are especially viable in the adult entertainment industry because they are privacy-centric and incorporate more anonymity tools than traditional tender.

Verge continues to be a payment method offered to performers on Pornhub.

Later that year, Pornhub opened support for Tron and Horizen (formerly known as ZenCash). Despite its support for cryptocurrency payments, Pornhub revealed crypto payments accounted for “less than 1% of purchases made” on the platform last year. The low adoption rate of cryptocurrency payments in Pornhub could be a direct result of the volatility in the market. Price described this featured as “very concerning.”

Justin Sun, the CEO at TRON, suggested that since Pornhub already supports TRX, they could also add support for Tether (USDT-TRC20). The integration of a stablecoin could address the volatility concerns.

Hopefully, something good could come out of PayPal’s decision to freeze Pornhub payouts. If a significant number of people start disapproving of these practices, companies like PayPal could be forced to make changes to their policies and become more censorship-resistant. In the meantime, cryptocurrencies offer an alternative solution.