Verge (XVG) is a privacy focused cryptocurrency that has been through a great deal of ups and downs over the past 2 years. While privacy was the main focus of the project, speed and transaction costs are also particular goals of the project. Verge also has quite a history and is one of those polarising projects that has a strong community following but many detractors and skeptics. Is this skepticism warranted or is it merely “FUD”?
In this Verge review, I will attempt to answer that. I will also take an in-depth look at the use cases for XVG and its long term adoption potential.
Verge History
Verge (XVG) was created back in 2014 and was originally called DogecoinDark. The rationale for creating the new blockchain and coin was that the Bitcoin blockchain was too transparent. The creator felt that by making wallet addresses freely open to public inspection people were at risk of government agencies or other users tracing a wallet’s history and learning the balance held.
The creator of DogecoinDark claimed that this made Bitcoin no better than traditional fiat currencies held in a bank account. And that prompted the creation of a fully private blockchain to protect financial privacy which would eventually be known as Verge.
Verge was started by an initially anonymous developer called “Sunerok”. However, his identity was later revealed in order to be build more trust in the project (covered below).
Verge and Financial Privacy
Our traditional financial organizations such as banks, insurance companies, and other lenders regularly infringe on the financial privacy of citizens. They keep constant track of how much you have in your accounts, your incoming and outgoing funds, where you spend your money, what the money is spent on and so much more.
Increasingly there are people who believe that financial privacy should be a basic human right and that no one should have the ability to spy on your financial activities. No other person or entity should be able to track and store financial information about others. Verge (XVG) was created to solve these problems, allowing anyone on the planet to use its currency as an untraceable medium of exchange.
Verge is also impeccably democratic, with an open-source code base upon which anyone can suggest improvements. Those suggestions are voted on by the development team, and if a majority of Verge holders support the change it is implemented.
How Verge Ensures Financial Privacy
Because Verge (XVG) was created as a solution to the lack of privacy in Bitcoin I’ll be making comparisons with Bitcoin as I explain how Verge improves privacy on the blockchain.
Verge has improved on this by including 2 methods to hide your IP address, making your transactions untraceable.
The first method is known as TOR or the Onion network. TOR works by standing in between the Verge blockchain and your internet service provider and using its many servers to change you’re the IP address being sent from your internet provider to the Verge blockchain. This hides your location effectively, making it increasingly difficult for a bad actor to trace your location.
The second method is called I2P and while it is similar to TOR, it is also considered to be more efficient because it uses multiple paths rather than a single path like TOR. Using multiple paths allows I2P to break up your transaction into several parts, making it much more difficult to trace a transaction since only part of the information is accessible from any one path.
Verge released the Wraith Protocol on January 1, 2018, which allows Verge users to choose between sending their transactions in an open environment, or behind the veil of the closed doors created by the wraith protocol.
Verge Community
This has to be one of the strong points of the Verge project. Verge is well known for having a very active, passionate and engaged community. “Vergefam” is the moniker adopted by the group. A strong community is great for the adoption of a cryptocurrency as it leads to more awareness from those outsides of the project. It could also spur more merchant adoption and partnerships.
In terms of the Verge (XVG) following, they have a pretty large Telegram group with over 19k members. I decided to jump into the Telegram to get a sense of the discussions that were taking place. As you can see, it is currently comprised mostly of memes and other banter. There was unfortunately not that much technical discussion amoung the members.
Over on their social media accounts, Verge has a pretty sizable following on Twitter with over 300k followers. This is more than we have seen at other projects and it all appears to be organic. On their Twitter, they regularly keep their community updated with the latest to come out of the project. This includes new features, partnerships or community engagements (of which there are quite a few)
Moving on, they also have a Reddit account as well as a Facebook, Discord and YouTube. I jumped into their Reddit and they have about 53k members. There is less discussion here than there is in the Telegram. In terms of the community engagements, Verge has held quite a number of them around the world. For example, they held their most recent one in Rotterdam which seemed to be well attended.
Partnerships
Verge (XVG) has taken the view that adoption by merchants is key to growing out the broader ecosystem. Hence, they have been quite active in forming a number of different partnerships. Perhaps one of the most notable was the partnership that they formed with Mindgeek. For those that do not know, MindGeek operates the largest Porn sites in the world (PornHub, Brazzers etc.).
The partnership would see Pornhub offering verge as a payment method on their websites. This was indeed quite a fitting partnership given that Verge is a privacy coin and people can purchase Porn anonymously. Of course, this was just the most notable of the partnerships. The Verge community has been quite active engaging a number of online merchants and encouraging them to accept Verge.
There is quite an impressive selection of vendors including gyms, vape stores, hosting, vpn providers and even cleaning agents. You can find out more about these on the Verge Website.
Final Word
Verge (XVG) has indeed had quite a rocky ride. At one point it was in the top 40 cryptocurrencies in the world, and even though it has been punished by the 2018 crypto bear market, it remains in the top 100 of all cryptocurrencies comfortably, sitting at the #66 spot as of June 2019.
I like the fact that the project was launched without a pre-mine or any ICO. Moreover, there is a large community of adherents that are pushing adoption of the privacy coin. The numerous partnerships that Verge has entered into are also likely to increase awareness and use cases.
