Popular porn site Brazzers will now accept cryptocurrency, and it’s enlisted the industry’s hottest adult film star, Stormy Daniels, to announce the new form of payment.
The porn star, best known for allegedly having an affair with President Donald Trump, stars in a marketing video to promote using the cryptocurrency Verge as a payment method. You can watch the SFW video, where Daniels goes through a history of paying for porn, below.
Daniels has been in the headlines for weeks since it was reported that she had an affair with Trump in July 2006, when the president was married to Melania who had just given birth to their son Barron. A lawyer for Trump allegedly paid Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet about the affair in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. Hiring Daniels could be a stroke of genius for Brazzers as it attempts to give viewers an anonymous form of payment.
In a press release, sister site Pornhub describes how its visitors can make anonymous transactions with Verge by hiding their IP address and geolocation so the payment is untraceable. Verge, which split off from Dogecoin in 2014 as Dogecoindark and rebranded in 2016, uses Tor and an anonymous network layer I2P for anonymity instead of cryptography.
“History has proven that the adult entertainment industry plays a critical role in adoption for innovative technology,” Pornhub wrote in its press release. “We saw that with VHS, Beta Max, credit card payment icons and, most recently, VR goggles. We expect to see widespread adoption of crypto and blockchain in short order.”
Brazzer’s parent company, Mindgeek, will also accept the digital coin on Pornhub and sister gaming sites Nutaku. While cryptocurrency may be a solution for enabling anonymous payments, volatility and fees remain a problem. A number of companies that once accepted cryptocurrency, like gaming giant Steam, have abandoned it after rising fees raised prices. A quick look at its price history shows how Verge is just as unpredictable as leading coins Bitcoin and Etherium. According to CoinMarketCap, Verge is the 23rd most-valuable cryptocurrency.
MindGeek has taken significant strides to protect its users, recognizing the importance of their privacy and security. At the start of last year, Pornhub locked down its site by turning on HTTPS encryption by default and now offers a bounty program for people who report security vulnerabilities.
