It is a well-known fact among most cryptocurrency users and enthusiasts that bitcoin is not as anonymous as the mass media sketches it to be. Wallets and payments are publicly viewable on the blockchain and can be linked to users through IP-addresses and usage patterns. This has become a growing concern among privacy-focused users who do not want regulators and governments tracking their transactions. Thus, many have turned to more anonymity focused currencies of the so-called "second generation" of cryptocurrencies. One of these currencies with an especially rich feature set is Verge / XVG.
What is Verge?
The currency Verge was launched to the public in late 2014 which actually makes it one of the oldest privacy-focused coins on the market. However, back in these days it was launched under the moniker "DogeCoinDark". This name was derived off the fact that the currency was actually a fork of DogeCoin, which is in itself a fork of Bitcoin with a larger supply of coins and shorter block times for faster transaction speed.
In February 2016 it was decided that "DogeCoinDark" was not a good name anymore for a project that had grown to be a serious player in the field of anonymity coins and brought many features to the table that were not experimental anymore. Therefore, developers decided on the cryptocurrencies new name: "Verge".
Anonymity features
Verge improves the bitcoin technology by adding privacy features such the TOR network and the invisible internet project (i2P). The developer, who goes by the handle "Sunerok", prefers to remain anonymous but claims to have a strong background in IT security.
TOR servers in this context to prevent against traffic analysis by routing the users transactional traffic through a number of global servers, each participating in the TOR network. Each of these servers discards the origin attached to the data from the previous server, so that at the last server (the so-called exit node) it can be reasonably assured that no one knows where the original traffic originated from. As a result, users of bitcoin over TOR and Verge, which has TOR-support built-in without using extra software, will not leave a traceable transaction trail.
To form an additional security layer for the chance that TOR should be compromised, Verge also employs the use of i2P. i2P is an encrypted peer-to-peer routing network, similar to TOR but different in that it's approach is more like a fully encrypted, peer-to-peer VPN service. This double layer of anonymization aims to ensure that Verge payments remain untraceable at all times.
Verge also uses a multi-algorithm mining approach. As a result of that, many individual mining approaches work for Verge, resulting in more security through decentralization. At the time of this writing, Verge support five different mining algorithms: Scrypt, X17, Lyra2rev2, myr-groestl and blake2s. The proof-of-work approach is similar to Bitcoin and it's derivatives (Litecoin, Dogecoin) and the block time is a fast 30 seconds.
Future outlook
Verge has a clearly thought out roadmap that has been published a short while ago. The most interesting point on it is certainly the i2P/TOR powered Android wallet, a novel feature for any cryptocurrency so far.
Verge’s market capitalization is currently at $43 million at the time of writing and it's priced at around $0.0032 per unity. The total supply of verge coins will be capped at 16.5 billion, roughly 1000 times the total supply of bitcoin (21 million). All in all, Verge is a promising fully-anonymous coin with a high supply and extremely fast transaction speeds. If you are interested in this feature set, you should definitely have a look and consider adding XVG to your portfolio next to its other privacy focused contenders like Monero, zCash, DASH and PivX.