Meet Verge: The New Kid on the Block

While the world is in frenzy with Bitcoins, Ethers and BTC cash a past couple of days have seen a rise of a fairly unknown cryptocurrency Verge. In the early week trades as the world gets ready for holiday breaks of Christmas, Verge (XVG) has hurled into top 30 with a new market cap of USD 1.1 billion. currently placed at 29^th rank among cryptocurrencies in terms of their market cap.

With the month of December 2017 is a historic month for the Cryptocurrencies– with Bitcoin not just breaching USD 10000 but inching towards USD 2000 and also other cryptocurrencies or Alt coins following the suit. Last week the Verge (XVG) too joined this bandwagon and surged over 500 % clearing beating some of the best currencies in the game. Will it follow the same suit as to the likes of bitcoin is yet to be figured out?

So, what exactly is this Verge (XVG)? Verge is a cryptocurrency that is aiming for — privacy and anonymity. Verge, like many other cryptocurrencies, does not have a company behind it, is open source project. The community that is running the project, is the power and the fuel for development and future as well. Its development is self-funded by its developers and by donations. Additionally, the developers are exploring other methods to fund development including opening an official Verge Merchandise Store and Multi-Algorithm Mining Pool.

Whats the History? Verge (XVG) started trading in October 2014 and is, therefore, one of the older anonymous coins in the market. With its initial years being known as DogecoinDark, the goal of the creators was to make a provide features of anonymity and enhanced privacy features to a Dogecoin-based digital currency. On 15th of February 2016, DodgeCoinDark renamed and rebranded to Verge with the reason being that its use shouldn’t mistake it for something that supports dark and illegal. Although the new name did not change the technology and team.

What differentiates it? It’s its technology-  which has features like anonymity and privacy. Using what is called the “Blackhole” Tech, Verge’s wallet does no mixing and connects to I2P from 4 nodes which are all hosted by the developer and they hide the IP. Verge also has a transparent ledger that allows anyone to view all of its dealings, but guard’s user identities and positions by integrating both Tor and I2P to not expose IP addresses.

What is creating the spike? Verge uses ‘Simple Payment Verification’ (SPV) technology to keep validation times to around 5 seconds on average. Also, Verge focuses a policy of ultra-transparency and openness. It’s likely that Verge’s importance on privacy is alluring to investors. A natural consequence is that many investors are starting to understand the current weak spots in Bitcoin investing and trading.

What does the future look like? The anonymous cryptocurrencies market segment is fetching attention and is becoming fairly competitive, with currencies such as DASH, ZCash, Monero already having established themselves in the top privacy cryptocurrencies. It will, therefore, most likely take more than a dedicated developer team for Verge to compete with is moving at a great speed. Verge will also need to build a proactive community that is willing to promote the use of the currency and marketplaces that are willing to accept it as a spending currency for the coin to flourish. However, the strong vision, privacy offering and developer activity, Verge will be a good coin to add to your portfolio to diversify in terms of cryptocurrencies that offer privacy.