Over the past few weeks, we’ve discussed subjects ranging from the protracted cryptocurrency market, all the way through to ‘Top Cryptocurrencies for the Next Bull Run’. Today we’re going to start a series taking a look at the cryptocurrency projects we think you should avoid at all costs. Here’s our first recommendation.

Verge (XVG)

The Verge team and project have never really recovered from the ‘will they, won’t they’ moment over New Year’s Eve 2017 – with thousands of people googling what a Github is, and what it meant if the protocol failed to compile. The ‘Wraith Protocol ‘deadline, set by Verge’s own dev team, proved to be the start of their downfall. It promised to bring complete anonymity for cryptocurrency transactions and be a class-leading digital privacy currency.

Rumors circulated that Sunerok, the lead (and reputedly only) developer ‘fell asleep’ during this critical update – compounding the lack of consumer confidence. Moreover, further controversy surrounding McAfee’s and XVG Whale’s potential insider trading – and pumping of the asset – didn’t help matters.

Another Hack

However it was what followed a few months later that signed Verge’s own death warrant; a successful 51% attack, accidental hard fork and $3,000,000 heist (sorry, community ‘fundraiser’) to announce the Pornhub partnership. On the 4th of April, 2018, miners alerted the core development team to a major hash attack, with coins being minted due to spoofing the timestamp of new blocks.

The attacker, or attackers, had been successfully doing this attack for 13 hours. In a desperate attempt Valo, or Sunrock, pushed new code, copied from Peercoin. This new code caused an accidental hard fork – making a complete mess of the ecosystem’s compatibility.

Too Much to Handle

The final straw came when, after a very controversial community crowdfunding of just over $3,000,000 for a ‘major announcement’ (an announcement that was also delayed) Sunerok and the XVG team declared their industry partnership was with PornHub, owned by MindGeek. The news and controversy were so frenetic that Verge’s Twitter handle was DDos attacked, and the price of XVG fell 35% in a matter of minutes. The cryptocurrency has cratered in value, tumbling from a position in the top 10 to 43rd. Staggeringly, it has lost nearly 97.3% of its value since January 2018.

Conclusion

The timeline of Verge’s slow, and then very quick death, will certainly be studied for years to come. It’s not the first cryptocurrency project to fail, and it certainly won’t be the last. What is particularly fascinating is how so many people’s critical faculties were hoodwinked by the euphoric promise of the bull market, ignoring (in hindsight) the clear, repeated warning signs.