It’s a telling story of how emotional crypto investors are that Verge is even ranked high enough to be featured in this section. Verge boasts many excellent features, like 10 different mining algorithms to prevent ASIC attacks, privacy, speed, and more. Its community is one of the most die-hard, rabid, cult-like believers you’ll find anywhere in crypto. Tragically, their fierce loyalty is to a project that is at best broken and inefficient, and at worst, a scam.
Verge was launched from a previous project, DogeCoinDark, combining codes from other projects. The now infamous founder, Justin Valo, who is better known by his handle Sunerok, has over 8 counts of various offenses on his criminal record. The team on the website is largely anonymous and constantly changing, their photos turned into cartoon drawings. Even former developers have accused Sunerok of never intending to deliver a product, stating the whole thing is a scam.
In July 2018, Verge’s blockchain was hacked by an exploit in how timestamps are accepted in the blockchain. This allowed a hacker to exclusively mine blocks by himself, stealing 250,000 tokens. The lead developer at the time, who had never coded a blockchain before, accidentally hard forked the whole project (split it into two chains), which was another huge problem.
A week later, the same exploit was used to hack Verge again. This time, the block times were sped up, resulting in over 35 million tokens being stolen. It was clear to everybody outside of the Verge community that these guys did not know what they were doing. Verge lied about it, telling the rest of the miners their chain was under DDoS attack (which is literally impossible) stating this was the reason why everyone else was unable to mine blocks at that time.
The list of untruths, shady dealings, and unfulfilled promises goes on, but they did deliver on one thing. They did make an actual partnership with Pornhub to have XVG tokens accepted as currency to buy Pornhub’s premium membership.
Aside from that, Verge peaked at a market cap of over $2.7 billion dollars in December 2017. This is a fantastic example of how a community and a leader can create vast amounts of wealth out of thin air, hype, and some snippets of borrowed code. Verge currently sits ranked 42nd on CoinMarketCap, at $0.01 cent down from an all-time high of $0.19 cents.
Their famed Wraith project was never delivered, leaving many to ask the intentions of Sunerok, and if Verge will survive into the future. Only time will tell.
Interesting Facts:
● Several writers have collected a ton of evidence against Verge and made candid observations and conclusions: https://hackernoon.com/why-verge-is-a-scam-and-fails-to-offer-real-privacy-6fbcab232fb5 and https://cryptoslate.com/verge-inconsistencies/ and https://medium.com/the-crypto-times/verge-coin-49800dd1a4bf are just three of the many pieces written warning others to stay away.
● Yes, it is entirely possible for a total scam to be ranked so high and make so much money. See http://cryptofinance24.com/failed-coins-that-once-were-in-the-top-ten-p370-171.htm for a few examples, without even mentioning the biggest of all, Bitconnect.
● In December 2017, John Mcafee, a controversial but popular figure in the crypto realm, tweeted that Verge is a really strong buy at the time. The tweet resulted in around a 100% increase in the price of Verge, showcasing the impact an influencer has on the crypto market.
● Blockchain hacks are rare, but possible. Kryptos, Shift, DAO and even Bitcoin have been hacked before. Ethereum intentionally hard-forked to recover the over $150 million dollars lost in the DAO hack. Bitcoin was hacked way back in 2010 and removed the 180 billion Bitcoins that had been created in that hack, during the next update.
● A hard fork is an update that requires all participating network nodes to install their update. Any network nodes not running that update can no longer communicate with the main net and will start running a side chain with different ledger balances from that point forward. An example of this is Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.
Website: https://vergecurrency.com/
Coinmarketcap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/verge/
Originally published at cryptofinance24.com.