Verge Coin has had a tumultuous life. Volatility has always been high, and Verge has been the subject of perhaps more "pump and dump" operations than most coins you might look at. Even McAfee, famed prognosticator who attaches promises of eating his own genitalia, if wrong, to his price calls, has shilled Verge on Twitter.
Verge is actually a fairly old coin, by crypto standards, although it has exploded in notoriety recently. Public trading of Verge goes back to October of 2014, a "whopping" 3.5 years. It tends to aggressively mirror the pricing patterns of Bitcoin putting in massive peaks and drops in cycles every year or so. You might say it takes the elevators both upwards and downwards.
These aren't just technical and "shill"-related movements in price, either. Verge has been subject to a number of what we'll generously call "adverse events", particularly in the press recently.
First, one has to understand that privacy is one of the core features of Verge, in fact, one might argue it is the main reason for the coin to exist - providing a use-case with increased privacy. However, some privacy experts don't feel Verge's "Wraith" protocol truly provides enough privacy. I've not taken a close look at it myself, but I've seen enough complaints that I'm certainly placing it at least a tier beneath "seriously anonymized" cryptocurrencies like Monero.
Second, HACK(s). Verge has had several issues with hacks. My understanding was Verge's own lead developer "allowed" themselves to be doxed, and their social media account to be hacked, which naturally lead to exactly the type of fishing hijinx you would expect. This is a worse-than-normal infraction for a privacy-based coin.
In November, multi-currency wallet Coinpouch announced some of their XVG nodes had been hacked, losing some client funds. This is, admittedly, likely in no way a problem with Verge. I was unable to turn up factual citations for previous hacks, but I swear I heard about one about 2 months ago as well - file that under "hearsay."
Now, despite all the negative commentary, Verge actually has some good news on the horizon. The developers do seem to stay relatively active. Verge just recently closed a crowd-funding round wherein they asked the Verge community to donate XVG to fund extra features, and approximately $350,000 in XVG was donated. This will be used to fund development for, among several other items, support for the Ledger hardware wallet which of course I am a huge fan of. If Verge could be held off-exchange safely, then much of the risk of holding it medium-term would be mitigated and the higher volatility could become more of an advantage.
At 3 cents, this could prove to be a heck of a buy, but know that you are buying on primarily on a projected hype train and the fundamentals could come back to bite you if you decide to hodl onto your Verge like grim death. However, successful release of Ledger Nano support, or an upgrade to the "Wraith" privacy protocol could lead to another violent spike upwards.
As always, stay flexible...and do your own due diligence.
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Sources: Google, CoinMarketCap, TheIndependentRepublic, Bitcoin.com, FinanceMagnates.com
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