Based on blockchain technology, most cryptocurrencies have an open and public ledger. While this is required for these systems to work, it comes with a significant downside: Privacy is often quite limited. Government agencies, analytics companies and other interested parties — let’s call them “spies” — have ways to analyze the public blockchains and peer-to-peer networks of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, to cluster addresses and tie them to IP addresses or other identifying information.
Unsatisfied with Bitcoin’s privacy features, several cryptocurrency projects have, over the years, launched with the specific goal to improve on them. And not without success. Several of these privacycoins are among the most popular cryptocurrencies on the market today.
However, as detailed in this month’s cover story[1], Bitcoin’s privacy features have recently seen significant improvements as well and are set to further improve over the next months and years. This miniseries will compare different privacycoins to the privacy offered by Bitcoin.
In part 3: Verge
Background
Verge[2] (XVG) was originally launched in 2014 as “Dogecoin Dark” by Justin Sunerok, who is still lead developer of the project today. To cultivate a more serious image, the project rebranded to “Verge” in 2016. As a codebase fork of Dogecoin, its base protocol is similar to Bitcoin in many ways. (Dogecoin was a codebase fork of Litecoin, which was a codebase fork of Bitcoin.)
Verge has been in the news several times over the past year, most notoriously because the coin was successfully 51%-attacked[3] on multiple occasions. But Verge is probably best known for its partnership[4] with major porn site Pornhub, which made headlines all over the crypto media and beyond.
At the time of writing, Verge (XVG) claims the 39th spot[5] on altcoin market cap
