Remember when Verge, the totally-super-private-but-not-really coin was going to change the world? If you populated one of those “Master Crypto Traders” Facebook groups at the height of the 2017-2018 altcoin bullrun, then you were certainly shilled this garbage by every admin and “OG” on the page.

The major hype behind Verge came from the long-anticipated release of the revolutionary “Wraith Protocol”. There was an air of mystery surrounding what exactly this development did, but everyone in support of the project agreed that it was massive. In its production phase, Wraith’s function enables users to declare XVG transactions as either private or public. Private transactions would not be recorded on the blockchain and completely private (uh, kinda).

Cool stuff, but it gets even cooler. Wraith Protocol development dates back to 2014. Surely, Verge is one of the most legit initiatives in the space with developers grinding it out for years of bear market. Well, not exactly. The Verge “developers” weren’t working on Wraith Protocol. No sir, the one working on Wraith back in the day was 14 year old Whit Jack, under the alias “bassguitarman” on Bitcointalk and under a project name of OpalCoin.

Before we get into how much of a failure Verge is, we’ve gotta give props to Mr. Jack. This guy is the real deal. Crypto is unique in that age is not a barrier to entry, and Whit Jack was one of the first great altcoin developers in the space. He spent years working on OpalCoin, many of whose components and ideas got adopted by later privacy coins like ZCash (or stolen from by projects like Verge). Whit Jack is “the Bitcoin kid” and went on to intern with Coinbase and build some developments on Ethereum in his teens.

Anyways, this “totally revolutionary” Wraith Protocol was really just a feature of OpalCoin several years prior. The Verge team just took the code and changed the names from OpalCoin to Verge. Don’t believe me? See for yourself. Of course, once the cat got out of the bag on this one everyone up and quit on Verge, right? Of course not, this is crypto after all.

Verge is still kicking, even though it is the single most frequently hijacked chain. This is because the 6-algo PoW consensus mechanism has been broken for over a year. You don’t need 51% to take over the chain, you just need 16%~, enough to dominate one of the algorithms and tell the network to ignore the others. That’s right, anyone can take over Verge with a “16% attack”.

Well, enough on the hijacking issues that probably deserves it’s own satire actually real news post. Fact of the matter is, while this project has fallen significantly from its billion-dollar-plus valuation, it’s not exactly dead. Some of those facebook masterminds are still holding Verge, and it still boasts a US$75 million market cap, good enough to be a top 100 market cap coin. But uh, the bear market got rid of all the bad actors. Haha, right guys?

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