Verge (XVG Coin): Secure, Anonymous & Private Cryptocurrency Benefits?

About The Verge (XVG) Project

Verge is an altcoin with a purist and determined reach. What exactly is Verge? Essentially a copy of Bitcoin “with improvements,” Verge makes much of two fundamental essentials built into the project – anonymity and security.

Unfortunately for the coin’s future prospects, hackers have twice pseudo-forked the project, and trading on a bug that allows repeat transactions for a brief period using false timestamps, stolen vast amounts of money.

Designed to carry the original ethos of a people’s currency for everyday use, it aims at rapid and painless settlement of transactions anywhere in the world. The project claims an improvement on the original Bitcoin decentralized ledger as a completely autonomous and anonymous currency, able to facilitate major and minor purchases on a global, daily scale. Driven by the desire to see blockchain transactions dominate human activity as the default transaction method, the currency first came about in 2014 when it was called DogeCoinDark. It was rebranded to Verge in 2016.

Claiming the ability to handle B2B as well as P2P payments on any scale, the altcoin aims at an efficiency and speed that eluded Bitcoin after serious adoption. In the developers own words, the “grassroots culture” of the digital currency is what makes Verge “unique and dynamic.”

As the world watches altcoins grapple with limitations and some dead ends too, they might have a point. Adamant that the twin pillars of security and privacy should dominate a coin’s ethos, it can be argued that those attributes do indeed allow for greater flexibility for a tokenized coin. It is therefore most unfortunate that the altcoin has suffered the twin thefts it has.

Similar to an attack experienced by the Verge network not more than two months ago, an attack on the network was again successful on May 22, 2018. Once again, Verge developers are downplaying the severity of the attack which saw over $1.1 million in XVG lost in the first and around 35 million XVG ($1.75 million) stolen in the latest one.

Observers have criticized the team’s stance, pointing out that the base problem remains and that the bug fix that Verge applied after the attack doesn’t eliminate the prospect of it being repeated, a fatal observation for any altcoin. The XVG price declined around seven percent immediately after the latest attack.

Ranked as the 31st-largest cryptocurrency in the world, Verge has a circulating market cap of around $752 million. It was recently reported that the company has closed a deal to partner with a high-profile owner of the largest online adult entertainment sites, that will allow users to pay for content using XVG.

Why Is Verge Better?

Assuming the project can eliminate opportunism by tightening security, Verge is a better Bitcoin because it anticipates problems of scaling and other user issues. That said, with an embarrassing lapse like coding in the ability to get on chain and steal funds without employing phishing or other peripheral user weaknesses, it remains to be seen whether the project has the technical competence to truly generate a global currency.

Verge does streamline transactions better than Bitcoin, for example, and Verge employs “multiple anonymity-centric networks such as TOR and I2P” to optimize anonymity. In theory, Verge should be an all-round better Bitcoin, with highly sophisticated cloaking and messaging protocols at play. For businesses, the altcoin aims to become a one-click payment methodology, and so too for peer to peer transactions, as well as a user’s daily small purchases of whatever nature.

It remains hard to depict why the altcoin might be better than others when the worst possible scenario has manifested on the network twice, but in their favor the new development focus from the community is likely to finally address the ultimate vulnerabilities of the coin. Add to that the signing of some big business, its world ranking and demonstrable core value, and it becomes easier to see where Verge has improved on Bitcoin and how it could one day become the top-ranked digital currency.

The Verge Team

Verge Currency is a completely open-source software project and “not a private company funded through an ICO or pre-mining.” Development and marketing effort is supported by thousands of community members. The white paper, referred to as the “black paper” by the company, outlines the contributions of literally hundreds of people in some form or another, gives the author as CryptoRekt and the Verge Development Team as Sunerok, Gfranko and CryptoRekt. A few dozen notable contributors then follow too, highlighting the most significant builders of the network.

Our Final Thoughts on the Verge XVG Cryptocurrency

With the persistence of open-source development and an admirable determination to succeed, Verge’s prospects of becoming a standardized payment method one day are good. This is enhanced by the signing of particularly the online adult entertainment deal, as that industry is lucrative and sophisticated, demanding a very fluid transactional capacity, among other things. The privacy-centric stance of the cryptocurrency is also likely to find a snug fit with other industries who have privacy concerns too. As a standalone currency appraised on its merits, Verge has better speed and simplicity than others in key arenas and seems destined to avoid any scaling issues ever, based on its rollout so far. User complaints about transaction speeds and messaging are relatively mute too, and the altcoin has managed to improve on a few protocols at play in Bitcoin that have frustrated users.

The need for the network to address fundamental security remains paramount, however. The latest attack was what is known as a “51 percent attack.” Simply explained, the conditions for it falling under this term are that the perpetrators control over half of the computing power or mining hashrate of the network. While in this state of control, the attackers have the capability to inhibit new transactions, halting payments between other members of the network, as well as reversing transactions and thus double-spending coins.