VERGE (XVG) Summary: The Most Anonymous Of All? My Price Prediction for 2018

VERGE (XVG) is a secure and anonymous decentralised proof of work cryptocurrency. It is competing for viability in the 'privacy coin' sector, up against heavyweights including Monero, Dash, ZEC and PIVX.

True privacy is going to be an essential feature of cryptocurrency in future. We know that Bitcoin is not truly anonymous because there is a permanent ledger of addresses including their transaction history. This is far from ideal. Can you imagine having your NZD bank balance and transaction history completely public for all to see? I don't want people knowing that I spent $52 at McDonald's in the early hours of Sunday morning, nor do I want them to see how much I hold in my life savings. Having balance information publicly available could put you at risk of being targeted by criminals and forced to hand over the private keys to your wallet. Likewise, if you are a business accepting payment in crypto, if you do not have privacy features enabled your competitors will be able to see your cashflows, earnings and purchases.

When we talk about privacy, many people jump to the conclusion that we are trying to protect the identities of people doing transactions on the dark web and/or those involved with illegal activities. In truth, privacy is more about protecting everybody else from people who do illegal activities.

Privacy is something that will become increasingly more important as crypto matures. It's already beginning to be taken more seriously with Ethereum looking to introduce ZK-SNARKS to verify transactions while protecting a user’s privacy and Stratis introducing their Breeze Wallet with Tumblebit functionality to provide anonymity for Bitcoin users.

So what makes Verge different from all the other privacy coin players? Be rude not to start with its anonymity features. Most of the current cryptocurrencies that claim to be anonymous only mask or hide transactions on their network. The real issue here is IP address of users. If you cannot protect a user's IP address then you are not an anonymous coin. The only cryptocurrencies that follow this rule are Verge and Monero.

Verge has a transparent ledger that allows anyone to view all of its transactions, but protects user identities and locations by integrating both Tor and I2P so that IP addresses are not exposed. Tor (The Onion Router) is an IP service which directs traffic through a network consisting of more than 7000 relays. The goal is to make it near impossible for someone to analyse traffic info or use surveillance tools to track a connection. However, Tor's servers are often centralised - therefore Verge uses an additional layer of security in the form of I2P. I2P is much more complicated than Tor and involves all sorts of encryption and tunneling - I'll leave you to look into this if you like, but just know that the combination of Tor and I2P is legit for anonymity purposes.

The next thing that distinguishes XVG from its competitors in the Wraith Protocol. This is a highly anticipated update which is due to go live in 2-3 days (Nov 6th). Wraith allows users to seamlessly switch between public and private ledgers on the Verge Blockchain, so you can choose if you want a fully anonymous transaction or not. When Wraith Protocol is turned on  the transaction data is hidden and not visible via the blockchain explorer. Alternatively, as public transactions still have their place (eg for merchants who prefer to have an observable ledger for accounting purposes) the Wraith Protocol can simply be turned off, allowing the transaction data to be viewable on the public ledger. Verge still implements Tor in both cases to provide total obfuscation of IP addresses in both cases. No other cryptocurrency provides this ability to switch between public and fully anonymous transactions.

Further benefits include:

• Easy to mine
• Low fees
• Rapid transaction speeds (currently 400 per second, with future developments aiming to increase this to 2000 per second - faster than Visa)
• Smart contract functionality
• Implementation of BIP65, which allows the exchange between XVG and other coins via atomic swaps, eliminating the need for third parties or exchanges

When it comes to the team, the core dev team consists of the main lead Sunerok and 10 contributors. They also have separate website and marketing teams. Earlier in the year they had few contributors and progress was slow with no clear road map. Some of this has changed now, with a solid team backing them. The devs profiles are all made public and they are actively engaging users on social media. They did not do a pre-mine, which makes me happy. It means they purchased their coins on market just like the public - they have skin in the game. Some teams pre-mine their coin so that they have immense cash/coin stores on hand (Monaco 👎).

Let's go back to the road map quickly. One issue I have is that their road map only advances as far as the end of 2017. The team have said they didn't include any long-term items because things change too fast in crypto to anticipate that far ahead. I agree that crypto is evolving constantly but disagree that this should be a reason not to commit to a long term strategy or development goals!

Going forward, it appears that XVG is attempting to not just become a completely anonymous coin, it is also aiming to position itself as a widespread peer-to-peer digital currency. It has already been implemented as payment across the Discord app and it would be great if this could extend to other social media sites like Telegram or Slack.

Now we come to the price. XVG is currently trading at US$0.007, ranked #59 on coinmarketcap. Personally I think this is undervalued. While there are other privacy coins already established, for me the tech that Verge is offering is enough to have it placed in the top 20. With a market cap of ~$100 million, there is growth potential here. As a comparison, Dash's MC is $2 billion, Monero's is $1 billion, ZCash's is $580 million and PIVX is $160 million.

Proponents of Verge claim that it will one day hit $1 in price. This would mean a market cap of $14 billion. While this is not impossible, it is a big ask. This would put it in the top 3 cryptos by market cap. In saying this, even if XVG made it to 10c this would mean significant profit for investors. My personal prediction is $0.05 by mid 2018.

Verge might be more of a speculative coin at this point, but it certainly offers some interesting tech in the privacy space. I've got a small holding myself (5% portfolio), and will be interested to see how things go with the release of the Wraith protocol in a couple of days. Definitely worth a look team.

Verge can currently be traded on multiple exchanges including Bittrex, Binance, Cryptopia and HitBTC.

Official website
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