John McAfee said it would moon.

Facebook groups said it would moon.

Your friends said it would moon.

VERGE.

Enough said. It was one of the largest pumps….and dumps we have seen in a long time.

Let’s dig in to what Verge is about.

Verge (ticker: XVG)

Mid-Tier Shitcoin (rapidly approaching shit-tier..which is below low-tier)

Wtf is Verge?

First, we’ll briefly explain Verge’s technology, then we’ll dig into their history.

Verge is focused on privacy and anonymity, just like every other shitcoin.

They incorporate Tor and I2P for added privacy.

Tor stands for “The Onion Router” which basically directs your traffic through a free, global, volunteer relay network, which has thousands of relays. A bit more literally, Tor encrypts your data as well as the next node (IP address) that you will hit, multiple times. In the end, after many relays, the system decrypts the data and sends it to its final destination without knowing the source IP address.

This is a very different set of operations compared to your ISP (Internet Service Provider) who acts as a middleman to facilitate the movement of web traffic, where they know all of their customer’s information, and there is no privacy.

If you’re not familiar with Tor, look it up. It’s cool, but not perfect.

They also include I2P (the Invisible Internet Protocol), which is essentially another form of encrypting data through a volunteer relay type of network. Verge claims that both of these implementations together help with privacy and anonymity.

Lastly, they have their ‘Wraith Protocol,’ which allows for public and private transactions. Public transactions are done on the public chain like any other transaction. The private side routes stealth addresses through the Tor network. Stealth addresses are nothing new and are used as one time addresses that the funds are received in. Only the receiver can identify and take the funds.

All in all, this all sounds fancy, but it’s nothing innovative. Hence why a lot of n00bs bought in to Verge’s marketing and the McAfee pump.

Stealth addresses, routing through Tor, and I2P are definitely options that other projects have implemented, or considered. Compare this to Monero’s ring signature set up, zk-SNARKS, zero-knowledge proofs - the Tor/stealth addresses system implemented by Verge seems pretty weak. It’s certainly nothing that hackers haven’t already compromised. It’s no secret that malicious nodes can be setup to act as relayers and compromise the network.

Speaking of security, Verge has had a couple of software vulnerabilities exploited, which resulted in hard forks.

Basically, bad actors were able to mine blocks faster than the rest of the network, by taking advantage of timestamps in the Scrypt algorithm. This means the miners taking advantage of this exploit had the longer chain. Many times, especially in the case of Bitcoin's blockchain, miners will naturally choose the longest chain since they would believe that is the trusted one. (Read the damn Bitcoin whitpaper if you haven't...)

Verge has 5 mining algo’s available for PoW (a concept originally introduced by Digibyte), which they claim is an advantage, but evidently can be manipulated. Aside from manipulation, there are downsides to have 5 different mining algorithm options, which we can get in detail if you'd like. Tweet at us if this is of interest to you.

Tl;DR Verge is Bitcoin ran through Tor, with a less efficient mining set up :)

Some brief history. Verge used to be called DOGECOINDARK. Yep, you read that correctly, dogecoindark. Doge. Coin. Dark. Such shit, very bad name.

In 2016, they rebranded from Dogecoindark to Verge.

They were basically a dead community, until some more anonymous developers took over the project. They were trading at around 2 satoshi at the time. Yep, that is .00000002 BTC. Solid price….then out of nowhere it pumps 50x, when John McAfee organically educated the masses on Verge’s quality team and codebase (sarcasm).

Verge also ‘partnered’ with Pornhub, but due to the numerous exploits, crazy price action, and team anonymity, Pornhub removed the Verge payment option and pulled their partnership. *EDIT: Pornhub does indeed still accept Verge, we remember reading it ended - our baaad. 

It gets better….for this partnership (which failed) to materialize, they asked the community for XVG to fund this. They asked the community, which was pump and dumped on, for ~$75M worth of XVG….and they raised it! Crazy shit, people are so gullible.

AND...they got shat on again...

There is more we can say, but let’s move on and see who is behind this...even though there are not many, and they use anonymous usernames.

Who tf is behind this shit?

They claim to have no central foundation behind Verge, whatever that really means. I mean, ‘they’ did raise the $75M of XVG just for the Pornhub partnership. So, while there is no ‘foundation,’ there clearly are project owners.

They have a small team. They have 5 developers, 9 business development professionals, 8 marketers, 9 advisors, and 1 technical support person. Lol. All 5 of those developers simply go by usernames, and link their Twitter.

So, it is up to you if you want to trust Verge after their history of hard forks, failed partnerships, crazy pump, and its horrific old brand.

The community is damn loyal, we will give them that.

So...currently mid-tier shitcoin, probably approaching low-tier, then shit-tier. We do not think they can seriously compete with existing projects aiming for increased privacy and anonymity (which is like 90% of projects lol). 

Hope you learned some shit.

Chat soon!

- Mike and Aaron