Pornhub adds Monero amid credit card ban, accepts crypto-only in selected locations

Pornhub has added privacy coin Monero to its crypto payment options amid reports that Mastercard and Visa have cut ties with the adult content site.

Information of Pornhub's support for the privacy cryptocurrency initially surfaced on Sunday in the Monero sub-reddit channel. The list of supported crypto payment options verified by The Block now does include Monero, in addition to other coins.

It's not clear when exactly Pornhub added Monero but the move likely happened over the past weekend. Monero was not supported on Pornhub at least as of September when bitcoin and litecoin were added to the platform as payment options.

Meanwhile, Decrypt first reported on Monday that Pornhub now accepts crypto only as a payment tool for accessing its premium content amid the Mastercard and Visa ban.

But The Block has learnt that the crypto-only acceptance applies to selected user bases, such as in North America, the U.K. or Singapore, among others.

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The only payment option available for users with IP addresses in at least some European Union countries, for instance Amsterdam, Germany, Finland, appears to be either Lastschrift, which means direct bank debit, or SEPA, the bank transfer system for the euro zone.

Pornhub Premium's payment option for German IP addresses

According to data from SimilarWeb, Pornhub's five largest traffic sources come from the U.S. with 23.76%, which is followed by Japan, Germany, France, and the U.K.

Pornhub's support for Monero comes at a time when Pornhub is facing payment obstacles posed by Mastercard and Visa, who said last week that they had banned the use of their cards on Pornhub.

The ban followed their investigations stemming from an article of a NYT columnist who said the platform included content of child abuse and rape. Pornhub, for its part, refused such allegations in the NYT article saying they are "irresponsible and flagrantly untrue.”

Pornhub has not responded to The Block's request for comment.

About Author

Wolfie joined The Block’s news team in 2020 and switched to the research side in 2021 to focus on crypto mining analysis. Prior to The Block, he had been a journalist at CoinDesk for three years. Wolfie has a background in financial journalism.