Pornhub, one of the world’s biggest adult entertainment websites, now accepts cryptocurrency Tron as payment. This is significant for the newly independent Tron because Pornhub is a huge business.

Tron was launched on the Ethereum blockchain in April 2017 but soon announced itself as a competitor to its progenitor. It finally migrated to a Beta version of its own blockchain at the end of May and declared itself fully independent on the 25th of June. Tron is worth $2.5 billion according to coinmarketcap.com, but its value has been steadily falling since its migration.

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Pornhub represents a major new marketplace for Tron. Operational since 2007, the site published its 2017 ‘year in review’ in January, and the numbers are staggering. 81 million visits a day (or 28.5 billion a year), 25 billion searches performed (that’s 800 per second), 68 years of porn uploaded, and 3,732 petabytes of data transferred – “every 5 minutes Pornhub transmits more data than the entire contents of the New York Public library’s 50 million books.”

Pornhub was purchased by MindGeek in 2010. MindGeek is a Canadian pornography group which has been aggressive in its acquisitions over the last decade, according to Forbes, and now owns eight of the ten biggest pornography websites.

Tron has been making big moves since its migration. It acquired software company BitTorrent at the beginning of June for an amount which remains undisclosed but is reckoned to be well over $100 million. Some found this puzzling because BitTorrent is a file-sharing website which is completely open source.

Tron also recently won a listing on Indonesia’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, Indodax, which is predicted by some to be on its way to overtaking the country’s main stock exchange in terms of user numbers this year.

Zencash

Another cryptocurrency now accepted by Pornhub is Zencash, which is a fork of Zcash. Like Zcash, Zencash is an anonymity-focused coin. They two are similar, but Zencash has additional features such as encrypted messaging and secure nodes – a small number of blockchain nodes that protect the blockchain from attacks, motivated to do so with a reward system similar to proof-of-stake. It has a market cap of $67 million (Zcash is at $682 million).

Pornhub accepted Verge, another anonymity-focused coin, in April.

Traditional finance providers have often denied service to adult entertainment outfits, and this coupled with the obvious desire of customers to hide their identities make the sector ideally suited for cryptocurrency. 

Pornhub VP Corey Price said in a statement: “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.”