The recent Verge fiasco, which saw the Verge price increase 300% over a month due to a promised partnership with a “global organization with a vast network of high traffic sites” has come to a inveitable end. Upon hearing the partnership with PornHub, the price of the coin had nearly halved within an hour.

Verge’s crowdfunding effort technically wasn’t an ICO, but last month the developers had asked for 75 million XVG coins. While it’s admirable that they requested their own cryptocurrencies instead of the traditional Bitcoin or Ethereum (though Verge is mostly acquired on exchanges where you trade your big cryptocurrencies), it was hard not to look at the initiative with a grain of skepticism. The announcement was worded in a mysterious, elusive, yet positive and promising way which implied that you may be partaking in something massive.

Buy The Rumour, Sell The News

The PornHub partnership certainly didn’t erect the candlesticks, and the price had a somewhat flaccid performance, nearly halving within an hour after the announcement.

The “Buy the rumors, sell the news” principle, which had already been mentioned in the technical analysis, applies in the case of Verge. High volatility was already expected, but lots of hopeful investors thought the mystery announcement would bring about the largest cryptocurrency collaboration to hit the market.

Verge XVG partner

Who Pays For Porn?

PornHub, Brazzers, and the entire members of the MindGeek conglomerate really are big players of the internet and run multi-billion dollar businesses. However, the biggest problem can be found in the business model itself: these websites make most of the money from advertisements and affiliate programs, not membership purchases. As many Twitter users have already pointed out, nobody really pays for porn. 

Verge XVG partner

Sure, the prospect of getting involved into this new and exciting world of cryptocurrencies is great for a business like PornHub and to them it’s nothing but free publicity in the tech world. The fundraiser that the Verge developers have undergone must have financed the integration of payments, the cheesy YouTube video which hyped the partnership in a strangely futuristic way, and all the subsequent media campaigns which hype Verge as the first crypto to become part of a huge payments deal (it’s rumored that Asa Akira, Bridgette B, and Alex Lynx will be a part of the high-profile activation campaign in Silicon Valley and New York). 

But its unlikely to increase the demand for XVG unless Verge fans deliberately start purchasing PornHub Premium memberships just to prove their point, which doesn’t do much good to the world of cryptocurrencies.

Had the partner been Amazon, eBay, Netflix, or any big retail website which has an economic model that’s exclusively based on sales, it would have been a huge deal. But as long as the largest majority of people simply watch porn for free and contribute only to the ad revenue, this partnership is just another dose of hype which paves the way for the real upcoming partnerships.

But hey, what do we know? The Litecoin founder Charlie Lee seems to also be interested in making Litecoin a payment option on PornHub. But unlike the Verge guys, if the partnership comes true, the Litecoin Foundation won’t pay a single dime and just be happy that their coin has found a new utility among the others already available.