What Is Verge?

Verge is a cryptocurrency that focuses on total anonymity and privacy for its users.

Whereas Bitcoin succeeded in the mission of creating a decentralised cryptocurrency, Verge brings it further by making transactions completely anonymous. The currency is virtually untraceable and the users of Verge can make instant anonymous transactions.

How is this possible? Verge implements highly advanced blockchain technology built on top of services such as Tor and I2P that hides your personal data, such as IP-addresses and geolocation. With the future implementation of RSK technology, Verge will offer smart contracts functionality, while maintaining total confidentiality of the users, thus being the only cryptocurrency on the market combining such features.

Why not simply use VPN?

While communicating via Virtual Private Network (VPN) the only encrypted part of connection is from you to VPN provider. From there onwards, the communication remains unprotected. Thus, VPN service requires trust that your provider does not disclose information, logs and records about your operations. With Verge the user does not have to rely on any third party for protection of confidentiality.

How Verge is structured?

Verge Currency is a 100% open source project and The Verge Community has full input and inclusion in any and all decisions made in regard to new feature implementations. Verge is a grassroots style project with a core development team constantly working to improve upon the existing foundations of XVG. There was no ICO held upon launch, and no pre-mine took place.

What makes Verge unique?

There are many cryptocurrencies out there and they are often very similar to one another. Here is what makes Verge so special:

Verge Currency is a cryptocurrency designed for everyday use. It improves upon the original Bitcoin blockchain and aims to fulfill its initial purpose of providing individuals and businesses with a fast, efficient and decentralized way of making direct transactions while maintaining personal privacy.

Completely anonymous and privacy-focused - Verge uses multiple anonymity-centric networks such as Tor and I2P. The IP addresses of the users are obfuscated and the transactions are completely untraceable.

Active development team with many contributors - The development team is active and always in close contact with the community. You can easily reach the main developers for support or new ideas about Verge.

Great support from community - Verge is not a private company funded by pre-mined coins or ICO's. All of the development and marketing is supported by the thousands of members of the community.

Ready for mass adoption - Verge offers a wide array of secure wallets for multiple operating systems. The revolutionary Tor Android Wallet offers mobile anonymity, which is a unique feature among privacy-oriented coins.

Ultra-fast transactions - Transaction speeds are ultra-fast compared to other coins. Simple Payment Verification (SPV) technology allows average transaction confirmation times to drop to ~5 seconds.

Decentralized and open-source - Verge is a decentralized currency based on an open-source platform. There is no central control over the coin.

Bitcoin was developed and released in 2009 in response to an inherent flaw in the way transactions were processed on the Internet. In his whitepaper, Nakamoto explains that ?Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model.

Since its original inception in 2009, Bitcoin has been rapidly adopted into today's modern marketplaces. A primary issue with Bitcoin's rapid adoption is the increase of demand on the original blockchain to handle varying degrees of large transactions. With increased demand comes increased transactional waiting periods, and this has resulted in higher transactional fees in attempts to try and speed-up transaction confirmation times.

The core innovation behind Bitcoin is its decentralized structure. Unlike traditional fiat currencies, Bitcoin has no central control, no central repository of information, no central management, and no central point of failure. However, one of the challenges facing Bitcoin is that most of the actual e-services and e-businesses built around the Bitcoin ecosystem are centralized.

Due to the centralized nature of the current system, e-commerce is ran by individuals in specific locations that utilize vulnerable computer systems, that are susceptible to legal entanglements. Verge is one of the truly decentralized currencies available today due to its standing commitment to building off of the core fundamentals of Bitcoin, while bringing an entirely new layer of anonymity to realization.

Tor Integration

Tor, derived from an acronym for the original software project name. The Onion Routeris an IP obfuscation service which enables anonymous communication across a layered circuit based network. Tor directs internet traffic through a free worldwide volunteer overlay network consisting of more than seven thousand relays to conceal a users location and usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis.

The layers of encrypted address information used to anonymize data packets sent through Tor are reminiscent of an onion, hence the name. That way, a data packet's path through the Tor network cannot be fully traced. Tor's use is intended to protect the personal privacy of users, as well as their freedom and ability to conduct confidential communication by keeping their Internet activities from being monitored.

Onion routing is implemented by encryption in the application layer of a communication protocol stack, nested like the layers of an onion. Tor encrypts the data, including the next node destination IP, multiple times and sends it through a virtual circuit comprising successive, randomly selected Tor relays.

Each relay decrypts only enough of the data packet wrapper to know which relay the data came from, and which relay to send it to next. The relay then rewraps the package in a new wrapper and sends it on. The Final relay decrypts the innermost layer of encryption and sends the original data to its destination without revealing, or even knowing, the source IP address.

Because the routing of communication is partly concealed at every hop in the Tor circuit, this method eliminates any single point at which the communicating peers can be determined through network surveillance that relies upon knowing its source and destination.

I2P Integration

I2p was originally built to provide hidden services which allow people to host servers at unknown locations. I2p provides many of the same benefits that Tor does. Both allow anonymous access to online content, make use of a P2P-style routing structure, and both operate using layered encryption.

However, I2p was designed to be a network within the internet,(see figure 2.1) with traffic staying contained in its borders. I2P performs packet based routing as opposed to Tors circuit based routing. This provides the benefit of permitting I2p to dynamically route around congestion and service interruptions in a manner similar to the internets IP routing. This provides a higher level of reliability and redundancy to the network itself.

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The first time a client wants to contact another client, they make a query against the fully distributed "network database" - a custom structured distributed hash table (DHT) based off the Kademlia algorithm [2]. This is done to find the other client's inbound tunnels efficiently, but subsequent data between them usually includes that information so no further network database lookups are required.

Emphasise something else here Rather than relying on a centralized set of directory servers, like Tor, I2p uses two distributed hash tables to coordinate the state of the network. Distributed hash tables or DHTs are a distributed and often decentralized mechanism for associating hash values with content. The primary advantage to DHT?s are their scalability.

A successful decentralized P2P network requires good scalability of its services to ensure the size of content or transaction sharing can continue to grow as required. Additionally I2P does not rely on a trusted directory service to get route information.

Instead, network routes are formed and constantly updated dynamically, with each router constantly evaluating other routers. Lastly, I2p establishes two independent simplex tunnels for traffic to traverse the network to and from each host as opposed to Tor?s formation of a single duplex circuit (see figure 1.1).

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Electrum

Electrum's strength is speed and simplicity, with low resource usage. It uses secure remote servers that handle the most complicated parts of the Verge network and also allows users to recover their wallets with a secret seed phrase.

Additionally, Electrum offers a simple and easy to use cold storage solution. This allows users to store all or part of their coins in an offline manner. Moreover, Electrum is one of the only wallets to provide native Tor and i2P support. By integrating Electrum with Tor and i2P, one can achieve anonymity while using the desktop/mobile wallet.

Both IP address and transaction information is secured and does not leak to the connecting servers; increasing user privacy. Electrum enables multi-signature support, which requires more than one key to authorize a Electrum transaction.

Standard transactions on the Verge network could be called. Single-signature transactions, because transfers require only one signature - from the owner of the private key associated with the Verge address. An Electrum transaction, with multi-signature support, requires the signatures of multiple people before the coins can be transferred. Verge then requires multiple different party addresses to be provided in order to do anything with them.

Multi-Algorithm Support

Verge is a multi-algorithm cryptocurrency that is designed to enable people with different types of mining devices to have equal access to earning coins. It is one of the only cryptocurrencies to support 5 hash functions combined on one blockchain.

This results in increased security and a wider range of people and devices that can mine Verge hence equal distribution of Verge is ensured for everyone. The total supply of Verge is 16.5 Billion coins. What makes Verge stand out from other cryptocurrencies are the 5 Proof-of-Work algorithms that run on its blockchain, namely Scrypt, X17, Lyra2rev2, myr-groestl and blake2s. All 5 algorithms have a 30-second block target block time.

The difficulty is influenced only by the algorithm?s hash rate. This allows improved security and protection against 51% attacks.

Android Tor + I2P

Verge sits at the forefront of innovation in the mobile cryptocurrency space. We have pioneered and developed two very unique and first of their kind android wallets. One of which operates exclusively on The Onion Router Network (Tor) and the other operating exclusively on The Invisible Internet Project (i2P). The Verge Tor and I2p wallets are built around the premise of anonymity.

The wallets have no built-in ability to connect to or broadcast user information over Clearnet. Transactions are completed via Simple Payment Verification (SPV), a technique described in Satoshi Nakamotos paper that allows for the wallet to verify transactions through proof of inclusion; a method for verifying if a particular transaction is included in a block without downloading the entire block (similar to how an Electrum wallet functions).

SPV allows for nearly instant payment confirmations because it acts as a thin client that only needs to download the block headers, which are drastically smaller than full blocks. The Verge Tor and i2P wallets also have built in security features such as a 4 digit pin code and biometric locking options for an added layer of physical security.

Additionally, the Verge Tor and i2P wallets are able to handle P2P QRcode scan transactions with instant verification. Clients are able to also import QRcodes from paper wallets to pull balances from cold storage if required.

P2P Platform-Integrated Portals

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) transaction support for Telegram, Discord and Twitter is supported by Verge, Slack and Steam integrations are currently in development, and is slated to be released to the public in the month of August. Telegram is a free cloud-based instant messaging service that supports Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Windows NT, macOSand Linux.

Telegram uses a symmetric encryption scheme called MTProto. The protocol was developed by Nikolai Durov and other developers at Telegram and is based on 256-bit symmetric AESencryption, RSA 2048 encryption and Diffie?Hellman key exchange. Discord is a proprietary freeware VoIP application that has widespread adoption in the crypto community.

Like Telegram, Discord has support on Windows, macOS, Android, iOSand has a browser accessible web client. Implementing Verge P2P capabilities on these platforms allows users to send and receive funds on the fly, no matter where they are (regardless if they have an actual wallet installed or not). P2P is an online technology that allows users to transfer coins via the internet or mobile device.

To do this, consumers use an online application, or in this case a bot to designate the amount of coins to be transferred. The recipient is designated by just their username and once the transfer has been initiated by the sender, the recipient then receives a notification to use the online bot. that he has received a payment at a newly established deposit address.

The user is then allowed to tweet or message the bot with a simple command such as ?!withdraw?and is then prompted with a set of instructions on how to receive their newly acquired Verge. This service does not require any additional information past the amount you want to send and who to send to. No privacy information such as IP addressing, location, name is retained during this process.

Your personal identity outside of initiating the transaction remains completely anonymous. Verge is one of the only cryptocurrencies to already offer P2P solutions for Telegram, Discord, Twitter and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) with Reddit, Slack and Steam support coming at a future date. These P2P offerings allow users to transfer Verge to anyone on the same social platform as them.

Wraith Protocol

Wraith Protocol makes it possible to choose between a public or private ledger for the first time in cryptocurrency history, while staying anonymous in both cases. Through this innovative new system, users who value transparency and accountability, e.g. merchants, have the option to have transactions viewable on the blockchain.

On the other hand, it also provides an option to those who prefer transactions to vanish entirely. Wraith Protocol allows for complete anonymity to be maintained while providing a safe and secure method of sending and receiving Verge coins without transactions being traceable on a publicly accessible ledger.

The update includes stealth Addressing and the latest Tor+SSL integration that will take our core QT users off of clearnet, and migrate them to exclusively operate on the latest Tor network. Also included are the capabilities to designate which ledger a user wishes to transact across, public or private.

With elegant simplicity, the Wraith Protocol update will enable users to toggle a switch within the Core QT wallet that allows them to transact via stealth addressing with an additional layer of IP obfuscation through the Tor Network.

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What is Stealth Addressing?

Stealth Addressing allows senders to create an unlimited number of one-time destination addresses on behalf of the recipient without any interaction between the parties. These addresses can only be recovered and spent by the recipient and cannot be publicly linked to either the sender or receiver addresses from which they were derived.

This is achieved through a system of cryptography known as Elliptic Curve, or more specifically in this case. Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH for short). ECDH works by allowing any two individuals who know each others?public keys to be able to calculate a shared secret that nobody else can either duplicate or link to either party?s public keys.

Due to the unique cryptographic properties of the ECDH algorithm, the shared key cannot be reverse engineered to arrive at either the sender or receiver addresses. A Verge Currency Stealth Address is a 95 character string that consists of a public view key and a public send key.

When Anthony sent Verge to Billy, Anthony will use Billy?s public view key and public spend key as well as some random data to generate a unique one-time public key (Stealth Address) for Billys new output. Everyone can see the one-time public key on the blockchain but only Anthony and Billy know that Anthony sent Verge to Billy. The output is created in such a way that Billy is able to locate the output destined for him by scanning the blockchain with his wallets private view key.

Once detected and retrieved by Billy's wallet he would be able to calculate a one-time private key that corresponds with the one-time public key and spend the relevant output with his wallets private spend key. This whole process occurs without ever having Billy's wallet address publicly linked to any transaction.

Atomic Swaps

Atomic swaps, aka atomic cross-chain trading, allows for interoperability between Verge and all other cryptocurrencies in circulation with Atomic swap capabilities enabled. An Atomic swap works in the same way users would send funds to one another by allowing users to cross-trade different cryptocurrencies without relying on centralized parties.

Verge will be implementing BIP65 Check Lock Time Verify (CLTV) otherwise known as Hash Time-Locked Contract. (HTLC). HTLC is a class of payments that use hash-locks and time-locks that require the receiver of a payment to acknowledge receiving the payment prior to a deadline by generating cryptographic proof of payment or forfeit the ability to claim the payment, returning it to the payer.

For example, both parties submit their individual transactions to the appropriate blockchain. User A sends Verge on the Verge blockchain, and user B sends ETH on the Ethereum blockchain. The recipient can only claim this transaction by revealing a secret hash (proof of payment). This results in both transactions being linked to one another, despite them taking place across two different blockchains.

If the recipient does not reveal their secret hash - the payment is then forfeit and returned to the payer. Our users will be able to leverage Atomic Swaps while transacting across the Tor network via Wraith Protocol, thereby maintaining IP obfuscation and personal identity integrity while sending and receiving Verge through cross-chain transactions.

Furthermore, this implementation not only allows for cross-chain transactions but it also paves the way for future implementations such as the Lightning Network, which will allow for automatic execution of cross-chain transactions and trading.

Roadmap

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Getting Started With Verge

Verge is a cryptocurrency designed for people and for everyday use. It improves upon the original Bitcoin blockchain and aims to fulfill its initial purpose of providing individuals and businesses with a fast, efficient and decentralized way of making direct transactions while maintaining your privacy.

Their mission is to empower people around the world by bringing blockchain transactions into everyday life. Verge Currency makes it possible to engage in direct transactions quickly, efficiently and privately. With Verge Currency, businesses and individuals have flexible options for sending and receiving payments. With the flip of a switch, we offer helpful integrations and tools that enable them to handle large scale transactions between merchants and small scale private payments.

Verge Currency was created in 2014 under the name DogeCoinDark. in 2016, it was rebranded to Verge Currency.

Verge Currency is 100% open source project and not a private company funded through an ICO or premining. Development and marketing effort is supported by thousands of community members.

There are a few different ways to get Verge (XVG) coins. The most common option is buying them on a supported exchange. Users can also tip each other on integrated social platforms (using official Verge bots). If you have an Android device, you can also take Verge on the go and send/receive coins with your mobile Verge wallet app.

Verge Currency was not premined. The development team and contributors purchase the coins on the open market like anyone else. A premine is a funding mechanism, whereby the developers of a currency allocate a certain amount to go to a particular address before releasing it to the public.

The maximum supply is capped at 16.5 billion XVG.

Verge Currency is designed this way on purpose to allow for convenient payment amounts in everyday use. As opposed to Bitcoin, you would not have pay with 0.00004 BTC, for example. Another reason is to reduce the risk of market manipulation by making it harder to control a big portion of the total supply.

Since there was no premine or ICO, the team does not hold a significant amount of coins to affect the coin distribution or total circulation. This is yet another reason for high total supply. However, if you feel like burning some of your own coins, please feel free to do so or donate to the team ;)

The simplest way of support is by donating to fund the development. XVG and BTC addresses can be found here. If you would like to contribute to the project in the area of software development, digital marketing, video and graphic design or any other, please fill out this form or reach out to us directly via email [email protected].

Verge is an open-source project, so all of the development work is funded by the developers and community donations. We are currently exploring other methods to fund development including opening an official Verge Merchandise Store and Multi-Algorithm Mining Pool.

They believe a blockchain should be public if it is a currency, for a wide array of reasons; most of them to protect the users of the currency. With a public blockchain, you are able to see coin distribution and how many people are using the currency.

You are able to see all transactions on the blockchain, but you won't know who the transactions are going to or where the senders/receivers physically are located.

How To Get A Verge Wallet?

Fundamentally, there are two types of Verge wallets you can use; QT and/or Electrum. For everyday users, we recommend you download an Electrum wallet.

Electrum is an open-source Bitcoin lite wallet solution. Verge has forked the Electrum wallet codebase and updated to have it work with the Verge blockchain.

Verge Electrum Wallet

A Verge Electrum wallet is a wallet that is focused on speed and low resource usage. Electrum wallets use a technology called, Simple Payment Verification (SPV), that verifies transactions on the Verge blockchain without needing to download the entire blockchain. The SPV technology allows average transaction confirmation times to drop to ~5 seconds (instead of ~30 seconds for non-Electrum).

QT Wallet

QT is a cross-platform application and UI framework for developers using the C++ programming language. It allows developers to write code in C++ and then release their software to various software and hardware platforms. Per Wikipedia, the toolkit was named QT because "the letter Q looked appealing in Haavard's Emacs typeface, and 't' was inspired by Xt, the X toolkit".

QT wallets require that you download the entire Verge blockchain to your computer. In other words, your computer must download a record of every single Verge transaction that has ever occurred. Currently, the Verge blockchain is ~1GB and will continue to climb as more users make transactions. If you are using a QT wallet, make sure your device has enough extra storage to handle it.

Every time you open your QT wallet, the wallet will synchronize and download the latest blockchain data to your computer. If you decide to use a QT wallet, you will most likely want to use it on a regular basis; or it could take an hour or more (depending on how long it has been since you opened your wallet last) to download the latest blockchain updates.

If you are using an Electrum wallet, all you have to do is keep your 9 word seedphrase secure. You are provided your seedphrase when you first create your Verge wallet and can access it by looking in your app settings (it is password protected). We recommend that you do not store your seedphrase electronically, since that would make it possible for it to be stolen. If someone steals your seedphrase, then they could steal all of your coins.

As long as you have your seedphrase, you will always be able to recover your wallet. For example, if Bob is using the Verge TOR Android wallet and accidentally drops his phone in water (breaking it), he can easily recover his Verge wallet on his new phone by re-downloading the Verge app and entering the seedphrase that was provided to him originally on his previous phone. Same applied for Desktop Electrum wallets. If you do not remember your seedphrase, all of the coins you had in your wallet will be lost.

If you would like to encrypt your QT wallet, you can create a passphrase by going to Settings -> Encrypt Wallet. Once you have created a passphrase, you can create an encrypted backup of your wallet by going to File -> Backup Wallet. The private keys of the QT wallet are saved in a wallet.dat file. Whenever you send Verge coins, it will use the private key from the wallet.dat file. Keep in mind that every time you create a new Verge wallet address, you MUST create a new backup.

As long as you have your up-to-date wallet.dat file, you can recover and import your coins into a Verge wallet. If you lose your wallet.dat file, all of the coins you had in your wallet will be lost.

Yes, you can download the latest Verge blockchain. After you download the latest blockchain, please read the provided instructions. After you complete the instructions and re-open your wallet, please allow the wallet to finish syncing the remaining blocks. This final sync can take up to an hour.

Please keep in mind that we also have alternate Electrum wallets that are significantly faster (they don't require you to store the entire blockchain locally).

Verge Resources

How To Buy Verge?

1. First we need to set up a wallet to store the Verge you're about to buy.

Go to the Verge official wallet page.

Choose the file that works for your computer and download it.

Once it has downloaded, unzip the folder onto your desktop and run the executable file inside (for example, in Windows it will be called 'electrum-xvg.exe').

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2. Once Electrum runs, make sure 'Create new wallet' is selected, and that 'Standard wallet' is selected. Press 'Next'.

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3. You will be given a 'seed' for your wallet.

It's very important you copy this down somewhere safe and back it up. If your computer is lost/stolen/corrupted you'll be able to restore your wallet using this seed.

Once you've stored it safely, press 'Next'.

You'll now have to retype your seed to confirm you stored it correctly.

Once you've done that, press 'Next'.

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4. You will be asked to enter a password. Make sure it's something secure but also something you won't forget!

When you've entered it twice, press 'OK'.

Note: if you forget this password you will lose access to your coins.

Your wallet will now open.

If you get a warning that you're not online, close Electrum, then run the program again. Press tools. Then network. Make sure 'Auto connect' is disabled, and then select 'elec2.verge-blockchain.com'. Press OK. You wallet should now connect to the Verge blockchain. If you're still having issues, try asking for assistance in the Verge reddit.

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5. Press 'Receive'

You will be given your wallet address, which looks like a long string of numbers and letters. Copy this somewhere safe as we'll need it soon.

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6. Now we'll purchase the popular cryptocurrency Ethereum, so that we can exchange it for Verge (if you already own Ethereum you can skip ahead).

Exchanges

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Where To Spend Verge?

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What Is Verge Mining?

You Can Mine Verge with AMD or Nvidia GPU