$0.002598

Verge is a digital currency and blockchain platform focused on privacy, aiming to create a fast and efficient decentralized payment network that improves upon Bitcoin. It adds features like Tor integration in its vergePay wallet and optional stealth addresses to enhance anonymity. The project is community-driven and open source, launched in October 2014 as DogeCoinDark, a fork of Peercoin, and renamed Verge in February 2016. It is now based on Bitcoin's code.

Verge was founded in 2016 by Justin Valo, also known as Justin Vendetta or Sunerok, a developer with over 20 years in network security and nearly a decade in blockchain. He created it as a hobby to promote privacy for individuals worldwide. Valo has been programming since age eight and later worked in network administration for a Fortune 500 company before starting his own security firm. He got into Bitcoin in 2011 and Dogecoin after its 2013 launch, developing Verge because he felt existing altcoins were inadequate and privacy coins like Bytecoin and Monero were insufficient. In 2017, he joined TokenPay's advisory board.

Verge aims to fulfill Satoshi Nakamoto's vision of a decentralized, trustless payment system while offering more privacy than Bitcoin. It routes all vergePay wallet traffic through Tor to anonymize IP addresses and uses dual-key stealth addresses for one-time recipient wallets. Atomic swaps enable trustless cross-chain transactions. The project seeks mainstream adoption through partnerships with athletes and platforms like MobiePay, MeconCash, and Crazy8Token. The team often relies on crowdfunding and community support for scaling and marketing.

Verge has a maximum supply of 16.5 billion XVG, intentionally high to keep token values low and avoid fractional payments, and to prevent market manipulation. No ICO or premine occurred, so all XVG comes from proof-of-work mining, which supports five algorithms: Scrypt, X17, Lyra2rev2, Myr-groestl, and Blake2s. Block rewards halve every 500,000 blocks, reducing miner rewards by 50% periodically.

Verge uses a proof-of-work consensus similar to Bitcoin, requiring at least 51% of full nodes to validate transactions. Mining creates new blocks competitively, but unlike Bitcoin, it supports five algorithms, which the team says enhances security by allowing broader participation. In April 2018, an attack exploited the Scrypt algorithm to instamine about 20 million XVG. The project hard-forked to fix the issue. Founder Valo called it a timewarp attack, not a 51% attack, as it manipulated block timestamps to lower difficulty.

XVG is tradable on exchanges like Binance, HitBTC, Bittrex, and Huobi Global. It can be exchanged for fiat currencies such as USD and EUR, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ether, and the stablecoin Tether.