"The future has cum."
Clad in balaclavas and carrying sacks of plastic coins redeemable for real cryptocurrency, porn stars stormed Wall Street last week with cries of "free money." No late-night TV parody, the scene was rather meant to mark one of the most surprising announcements in crypto so far in 2018, the news that verge (XVG) had been officially added as a payment method on adult entertainment website Pornhub.
Indeed, with an average of 81 million visitors per day, the deal with the name-brand website has been heralded as a defining moment for the industry, one that has also done much to boost awareness of what was until April 17 among the lesser-known of the many privacy-centric cryptocurrencies.
But the news has stirred up criticisms as well.
A relatively small crypto asset by market cap, verge's privacy measures have been long dismissed by some of the industry's top researchers. As such, the response from the broader crypto community has been, at times, incredulous.
"I don't view their deal with Pornhub as any endorsement or indication of their technical value," Sarang Noether, a researcher at rival privacy-centric cryptocurrency monero, told CoinDesk. "It just indicates that you can make a deal with Pornhub if you pay millions of dollars."
Of note in Noether's comments is the nature of the Pornhub arrangement, which found the cryptocurrency's users paying to incentivize the deal. In a matter of weeks, global verge users, or the "#vergefam" as they're sometimes known, raised 75 million XVG, or $5.2 million, in donations toward the partnership.
And the payments are continuing to flood into the verge donation address, where they will eventually be put toward a strategy that verge core developer Justin "Sunerok" Valo described as "a global marketing campaign the likes of which you have never seen."
"It's going to change crypto in a really, really good way," Valo told his fans.
But there's a darker side to the promotion as well. Dismissed by one user as a "cult of teenagers," verge's avid followers are known for being outspoken, even going to war with the notorious security developer John McAfee on Twitter in what was allegedly a paid pump gone awry.
Perversely, though, some think the coin's bad reputation might just increase its appeal.
Sarang told CoinDesk: