Anonymity & Deception

Cyber criminals loom in the dark reaches of the web searching for the next possible victim. When a person's spending habits or identity traits are revealed, a door opens up for Cyber criminals. Cyber criminals can easily use this information to abuse others. To avoid identity fraud, there needs to be a mechanism that protects individuals, perhaps by keeping them entirely out of sight.

Why does privacy matter?

“We believe that privacy strengthens social ties and social institutions, protects societies against their enemies, and helps societies to be more peaceful and more prosperous,” Zooko Wilcox (Zcash founder) said. “A robust tradition of privacy is a common feature in rich and peaceful societies, and a lack of privacy is often found in struggling and failing societies.”

Untraceable you say?

Since the beginning of Bitcoin back in 2009, many flocked to Bitcoin as an alternative to stay hidden from taxation or potential hackers. As Edward Snowden so recently tweeted, “Bitcoin is great, but if it’s not private, it’s not safe”. More and more people have become aware that users can’t remain fully anonymous when using Bitcoin since the open ledger reveals a list of public addresses that execute transactions on the network. Each transaction being directly linked to Bitcoin users who are buying and selling. Users have realized that they could be targeted easily. Projects such as Dash, Monero, and Zcash have popped up to solve this problem.

If we were to add Dash, Monero, and Zcash’s total market cap, we would get $12.05 billion for these leading privacy coins. This signals that many investors in the crypto space truly value privacy. One privacy coin has risen over the $2 billion dollar mark catching the surprised eyes of thousands of investors. Both Forbes and Bloomberg published articles on, and introducing, Verge.

This project jumped from a few million in market cap to a whopping $4 billion dollar market cap early in December of 2017. This coin was created in 2014 and was formerly known as DogeCoinDark. They rebranded to Verge on February 2016 to communicate to the community that they do not support illegal activity within the network.

Verge is a secure and anonymous cryptocurrency that has its focus on users who value privacy. They offer Tor and i2p integration into their blockchain to anonymize communication and traffic sent over the Verge network. Tor and i2P working together on the network have been said to be one of the best methods for fully anonymizing transactions within a network. Projects such as Monero have had issues with IP leakages in the past, provoking them to work on the implementation of the i2p network. Their solution is Kovri and the alpha version is currently under development.

What else makes these guys different?

Verge offers Electrum wallets for users using different operating systems. Electrum wallets allow users to trade tokens without having to download the individual blockchains so that the transactions are all done offline. This allows them to stay hidden from potential hackers. Communication through Electrum servers, which do not store user accounts or private keys, is known for speed, reliability, user-friendliness, and low resource usage.

Verge provides multi-algorithm support which is designed to provide users operating different types of mining devices a chance to profit from securing the network. Verge supports 5 different hashing algorithms (multi-algorithm support), intended to encourage more participation from varying mining operations worldwide, thus preventing centralization of hashing power.

The Tor and I2p Android wallet offers instant payment confirmations using a technique called Simple Payment Verification (SPV). Only the block headers are downloaded (much smaller than a full block). The time spent downloading the block headers reduces confirmation time drastically.

Wraith Protocol gives users the option to switch from a public ledger to a private ledger. This innovative tool allows users who value accountability and transparency, perhaps a company owner formalizing payments to employees, the option to have transactions openly viewable on the blockchain. The second option gives users the ability to be completely anonymous when making transactions, leaving no trace on any accessible network. They also provide an additional layer of security by establishing a connection with the Tor network when using Wraith protocol. This unique and original piece of technology was delayed, but released for public use on January 10th, 2018. (See chart below)

Conclusion

Let’s consider the market cap for all leading privacy coins (Dash, Monero, Zcash) once more. If we know that the overall market cap for these leading privacy coins is $12.05 billion, it would be safe to say that a project so undervalued such as Verge could potentially receive at least 25% or more of the total market cap (3B Market Cap) from these leading privacy coins. This would put Verge at 20 cents per coin which has already happened, even prior to the release of Wraith Protocol. With an overall market cap of $508 billion dollars for all cryptocurrencies in the time of writing, it isn’t unreasonable to see prices continue to rise for severely undervalued projects such as Verge in the long term.

After Thoughts

RSK Smart Contract capabilities are currently under development by the Verge team. This will provide a scalable solution for businesses who want to build on top of what is (currently deemed) the most anonymous network. The Verge network can achieve over 400 transactions per second, which is significantly more than what either Ethereum or Bitcoin is able to process.