July has been a relatively slow month for Verge currency, especially when compared to the moves that other market currencies made in that time-frame. It did experience a slight recovery in price at the turn of the month, when it respectably rose from being traded at 356 sats ($0.0207 USD) on June 30th to a current monthly high of 423 satoshis ($0.02798 USD) on July 2nd. XVG token has since stalled and is currently traded at $0.026382 USD, which is a 6.71% increase in the last 24 hours. With a market cap of $397,168,974 USD, Verge is currently the world’s 36th most valuable cryptocurrency, recently topped by a rapidly rising DigiByte and closely followed by Siacoin at 37th.
The usually loud-mouthed platform has been awfully quiet in the last couple of days. Ever since we last wrote about them, they continued to roll out a bunch of frankly disappointing partnerships that don’t really solve any of the core issues that the currency has. WooCommerce, WordPress and Easy Digital Downloads will now accept XVG as a payment option. Cees van Dam, one of Verge’s core team members, advertised these new partnerships via his twitter account:
“Looking for a way to enable a cryptocurrency payment gateway for WordPress, WooCommerce, and Easy Digital Downloads. http://mycryptocheckout.com, just added #XVG to enable this. Plugins can be found at http://wordpress.org/plugins/mycryptocheckout/”
European cannabis seed-selling company, Royal Queen, declared that it now accepts Verge as well. These partnerships are currently touted as the main selling point of the coin by its community but like I’ve pointed out before, they don’t exactly solve the underlying issues that XVG suffers from. Namely the issues with it being a privacy coin which doesn’t actually offer any privacy features and that it has suffered three 51% attacks in a very short period of time.
The privacy issue might be potentially solved as reports started pouring in that Verge is looking into ring signature-based transactions, that thing Monero had since its inception. Still, it would be a significant step forward towards actual privacy if this is implemented well. There is also talk of Verge developers cooperating with RSK to enable a smart contract layer for their own platform. But if these turn out to be implemented as well as the Verge QT wallet, they won’t improve the coins fortunes very much.
Apparently the Verge-QT wallet is terrible. Reddit user AmusingGnome posted a thread lamenting this piece of technology as a “very bad experience.” Quote:
“Some problems are that it:
Is incredibly slow
Doesn’t create a shortcut to the desktop after installing (running the .exe doesn’t work wtf? I have to double click taskbar icon for it to open)
Installs and loads in the background without giving any indication as to what it is doing
Takes forever to sync and requires me to download a nightly snapshot (didn’t even work)”
Many of the Vergefam quickly flocked to this thread to complain about their own issues with the wallet, seemingly tracing the source of the problem to a latest 4.0.2 software update. This tread is currently one of the most replied to threads on the coins subreddit, perhaps surprisingly so as r/vergecurrency/ recently got criticized for its heavy moderation.
Verge remains in a rut that it was plunged in when that Pornhub “partnership” first dropped and disappointed thousands of crypto enthusiasts. Their subreddit is eerily empty, with a few posts here and there either promoting a new project that accepts Verge as a payment option/donation or calling for people to HODL as recovery is just around the corner. For now, things look rather bleak for the XVG currency and it will be a wonder if this long-awaited recovery ever comes.
