Pornhub Dumps USDT for USDC in Stablecoin Pivot

Adult entertainment giant Pornhub is waving goodbye to Tether (USDT) and rolling out the red carpet for Circle's USD Coin (USDC) when it comes to creator and model payouts. Multiple content creators have shared screenshots of official platform correspondence, confirming the transition gives them until June 1 to update their payment details or risk their earnings hitting a brick wall. Pornhub claims the shift to USDC makes payouts "more reliable," patting themselves on the back over a stablecoin they describe as "fully-backed, MiCA-compliant and regulated." The pivot has already rippled through the platform's Content Partner Program and Model Program pages, which now showcase USDC and Verge as the supported crypto payout options—USDT conspicuously absent from the guest list.

The real engine behind this stablecoin shuffle? Regulatory compliance doing its best impression of an unstoppable force. Circle snagged an Electronic Money Institution license from France's Autorité de contrôle prudentiel et de résolution back in July 2024, months before the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets framework kicked into full gear. This maneuver positioned USDC as the inaugural global stablecoin approved for frictionless operations across the European Union—a distinction that helped it sidestep the delistings and courtroom headaches plaguing less compliant alternatives. Whether USDT gets the boot for Premium members remains a question mark, though as of press time, Pornhub still tolerates USDT on both Ethereum and Tron networks.

Pornhub's crypto dalliance reads like a Greatest Hits album of blockchain pivots. The platform first gotexperimental with crypto in 2018, slapping Verge onto Premium subscriptions, then gave PumaPay a spin for recurring billing—though adoption stayed more experimental jam session than chart-topping single through 2019. Things heated up when PayPal axed creator payouts in late 2019, prompting Pornhub to embrace USDT for those sweet, stable, dollar-pegged payments that thumbed their nose at traditional banking gatekeepers. The heat turned up another notch in December 2020 when Visa and Mastercard pulled the plug on payment processing, forcing segments of the Premium ecosystem to lean harder into crypto-based alternatives. Since 2021, the platform has broadened its crypto portfolio to include Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Dogecoin, and USDC alongside the stablecoin payout structure.

When Pornhub first jumped into the USDT bed back in 2020, they hitched their wagon to Justin Sun's TronLink wallet infrastructure for payments. Whether Pornhub plans to keep Sun's wallet system humming along for USDC payouts is still anyone's guess. Tether and Pornhub had not returned requests for comment at time of publication. The transition represents a noteworthy reversal from Pornhub's earlier cozying up to USDT—a relationship that blossomed when mainstream payment processors showed the platform the door, and now seems to be crumbling under the weight of an evolving regulatory climate around stablecoins in key markets.