Verge (XVG) Technical Director Brandon Simons has released a tell-all account about the origin of the cryptocurrency and his involvement with the early development and marketing efforts. In a post on his medium page, Simons who goes by the internet sobriquet CryptoRekt revealed that his interest in cryptocurrency first began in October 2009 when he discovered bitcoin, which he mined extensively for the next two years.

Following a hard disk crash in 2011 which saw him lose thousands of BTC, he became a regular on Reddit’s r/CryptoCurrency forum which served as something of a support group for people with similar stories. The loss he said, was where the nickname ‘CryptoRekt’ came from. It was in the course of this that he became involved with a privacy coin project known as DogeCoinDark (DOGED), which would later rebrand as Verge (XVG).

Starting from a small team with just over 120 active users in an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) room, DOGED slowly built out its vision of enabling private peer-to-peer transactions, eventually rebranding itself as Verge in an attempt to gain more widespread appeal. According to Simons, the marketing effort for Verge in the early days included social media ‘shilling’ and mentions on Radio Crypto, which was at the time one of the most important media channels in the crypto space.

Privacy Coin Verge Succumbs to 51% Attack [Again] https://t.co/4QPqDuSknR — CCN.com (@CCNMarkets) May 22, 2018

From Obscurity to a Market Force and Back Again

For a while, Verge remained relatively obscure within the crypto space until the release of the project’s whitepaper tagged ‘BlackPaper’ in June 2017. Shortly after, Simons began putting together a distributed global team working to support Verge and promote it on a practically pro-bono basis, given the project’s relative lack of resources compared to other ICOs at the time. This group of people, now known as the Verge Core Marketing team has now grown to about 40 in total according to him.

Explaining the importance Verge has to him on a personal level Simons said:

Verge is truly something special, it is decentralized, it has a wonderful community around the world, and it has a team of passionate individuals who just want to see it succeed — all the required ingredients for a successful project. What does Verge mean to me? Freedom. Verge to me is the freedom to help create & shape something that can truly provide a means for people to be able to retain a bit of their personal lives and not have to worry about sacrificing a basic human right; privacy, any time they want to transact for goods & services.

The full blog post is available here.

Featured image from Shutterstock. Simons photograph from LinkedIn.