PumaPay raises $117M in an ICO, to launch its merchant-friendly Pull Payment Protocol, which it says 30 adult entertainment firms have agreed to use
Stewart Rogers / VentureBeat :
Context & Ripple Effects
In May 2018, at the peak of the ICO era, PumaPay converted a token sale into $117M and a specific thesis: adult entertainment merchants need a crypto rail that behaves like card recurring billing — hence the 'pull' model, where merchants initiate charges rather than waiting for customer pushes. The protocol's first 30 committed users are all in that vertical.
The corpus validates the target market two years later: when Visa and Mastercard cut off Pornhub, the site moved its premium service to crypto-only payments — exactly the de-platforming scenario PumaPay was built for. By late 2021, consumer-facing crypto payments had scaled enough that MoonPay raised $555M at a $3.4B valuation, showing the on-ramp side of this stack attracting institutional capital.
First-order effects
- Thirty adult entertainment firms gain a recurring-billing mechanism that does not depend on card networks or traditional acquirers, while PumaPay starts post-ICO with a $117M war chest to ship the protocol.
Second-order effects
- Card-network de-risking of adult merchants becomes a customer-acquisition channel for crypto payment protocols — every cutoff event pushes high-risk-vertical merchants toward alternatives like PumaPay's pull model rather than back to incumbent processors.
Third-order effects
- If merchant exclusion by card networks keeps driving adoption, crypto settlement competes less on fees than on access — a structural split between programmable settlement open to any merchant and policy-controlled rails that can drop entire industries.
The trend: Crypto payments are being adopted segment-by-segment starting with merchants excluded from card networks, with infrastructure funding scaling the category behind them.