The highly anticipated Verge Wraith Protocol was confirmed for release before 2018 by the developer, Sunerok. The promised features influenced many investors to buy XVG in the lead up to the new year, expecting the price to take off once the update dropped. This update to the Verge cryptocurrency aimed to include more privacy options for users. Most importantly, the Wraith Protocol was meant to allow users to choose between making transactions on either a public or a private ledger, drastically increasing the potential use cases for Verge. However, once the midnight deadline passed and nobody had heard a word from the Verge team, there was pandemonium.
In the second half of December, the 2018 Wraith Protocol deadline was repeated numerous times by the developer, marketing team, and people who had personal contact with them. One user in particular, @XVGWhale, met up with Sunerok on the 23rd of December. After meeting with the sole Verge developer, @XVGWhale tweeted that he had seen the Wraith update and that it was ready to be released. These tweets built up the hype around Verge and assured investors that the Wraith Protocol was coming.
On New Year’s Eve, while many waited in anticipation, the clock turned midnight in the confirmed Verge timezone (Eastern Time). At this point, nothing had been heard from anyone on the Verge team regarding the Wraith update. This caused panicked investors to start dumping their Verge coins, thinking the project was a scam. In the minutes following midnight, the price of Verge on Binance plummeted from 1680 Satoshis to 1090 Satoshis. Since this initial drop, the price of Verge has been slowly trending further downwards.
Communication from the Verge team came 10 minutes after their deadline, at 12:10am. In these tweets, the Verge team stated that the new release was almost ready, and that they just needed to fix one small issue. Wraith was finally “released” 6 hours later. The “release”, though, was buggy and only for OSX. The Windows version of the new Wraith wallet was later released 11 hours after the official deadline. Since these releases, 25 new issues have shown up on the project’s Github page; the project was far from “ready” as stated by @XVGWhale.
This is not the first time that the Verge team has missed a deadline; it’s not even the first time they’ve missed a deadline for the Wraith Protocol update. The New Year’s deadline marks the third time that the Verge team has failed to deliver the Wraith Protocol. The previous release date was set in November, where Sunerok had mentioned he was already compiling the beta for Wraith. Oddly enough, even though the beta was ready two months ago, the eventual 2018 release failed to meet expectations.
Even worse for the Verge investors and team, the update didn’t even deliver what it claimed to. Xvg.keff.org is a website which connects to a public Verge node and records the transactions it sees. Being able to access and log transactions is expected, but the problem lies in the IP addresses being shown. Verge has claimed that the Wraith Protocol would make it so that all Verge transactions are routed through the TOR network, hence hiding user IP addresses. The IP addresses shown, though, are not TOR IP addresses – they are the unhidden IPs of users. You can easily check this fact for yourself by visiting a site which collects the IPs of all TOR nodes and comparing the IPs shown. With visible IP addresses, all of the other privacy features of Wraith such as stealth addresses and the private ledger are useless.
Overall, the release of the Wraith Protocol has been a disaster for the entire Verge project. It has exposed the poor planning and subpar communication of the Verge team, and has caused many investors to lose trust. It is definitely telling that many other promising coins, such as TRX, XLM, and XRP have seen significant growth into the new year, while XVG continues to dwindle. If you haven’t already, it may be time to sell off your remaining Verge coins and invest in other up-and-coming coins with more solid development teams.
Wow, I didn’t realise that there was so much evidence the Wraith Protocol doesn’t actually work… I guess the poor solo developer guy will eventually fix all the stuff so maybe one day it will be worth buying into? But it seems like they’ve been pretty unprofessional and at this rate, some other coin will probably release a privacy protocol like this sooner haha ? There are other coins out there people, you don’t have to be married to Verge til death do you sell!