All About Verge: The $1 Billion Cryptocurrency That's Pumping On Porn

Clad in balaclavas and carrying sacks of plastic coins redeemable for real cryptocurrency, porn stars stormed Wall Street last week with cries of "Free money." No late-night TV parody, the scene was rather meant to mark one of the most surprising announcements in crypto so far in 2018, the news that verge had been officially added as a payment method on adult entertainment website Pornhub.

The payments are continuing to flood into the verge donation address, where they will eventually be put toward a strategy that verge core developer Justin "Sunerok" Valo described as "a global marketing campaign the likes of which you have never seen."

"If anything, I think verge will use this to push some kind of 'bad boy of crypto' image. Whether or not it succeeds, people now see it as the asset that a big porn site accepts."

The boost corresponded with a tweet by John McAfee, founder of anti-viral McAfee software, who wrote that alongside monero and zcash, privacy-centric cryptocurrencies like verge "Cannot lose."

The incident highlights another issue, that verge's approach to privacy has long been a point of contention in the cryptocurrency space.

"So much for Verge $XVG and their IP address privacy," Riccardo Spagni, a core developer of monero, tweeted, with a link to the data dump.

Still, the website was dismissed by the verge community as "Fake news" and FUD, with others using the data dump as proof of the cryptocurrency's aptitude.

In a recent verge software release called the "Wraith protocol," the cryptocurrency project added so-called stealth addresses, a way to obscure the recipient of a transaction.

Just weeks before the Pornhub partnership was announced, a hacker took over the verge blockchain, mining one block a second and printing millions of XVR. Posted by a mining pool operator named "Ocminer" on Bitcoin Talk, the attack was a mining exploit that allowed an attacker to create low difficulty blocks by manipulating timestamps.

Citing allegations of developer negligence, ocminer called verge "An absolutely trashy shitcoin" that had been "Pumped in heaven through that tweet from John McAfee."