XVG is the native currency of Verge, a privacy-focused blockchain optimized for payments. It’s a spin-off of Dogecoin, a fork of Peercoin and, ultimately, derives from Bitcoin, a network with which it shares several similarities.

Verge launched in October 2014 as DogeCoinDark. The coin was worth fractions of a cent until December 2017, when bitcoin (BTC) hit close to $20,000. On Dec. 23, 2017, the coin hit highs of 30 cents, a staggering 1,384,300% increase from its all-time low of far less than 1 cent on Feb. 5, 2015.

In the wake of the crypto winter of 2018 and 2019, the coin fell to as low as just under 1 cent in March 2020. It wasn’t until 2021, when bitcoin skyrocketed again, that XVG reached 6 cents in May. The crypto market crashed shortly after when China released a series of anti-crypto statements and regulations.

The coin never fully recovered, and by June 2022 had fallen to $0.004. Yet, even that low price marks a staggering 188,149% increase from XVG’s all-time low of $0.000002 on Feb. 5, 2015.

By July 2020, 16.51 billion XVG of the coin’s capped supply of 16.55 billion had been mined by July 2020, according to data from Messari.

The project did not hold an initial coin offering or allow a select group of private investors to mine tokens before its launch. All tokens were introduced through proof-of-work, the same computer-intensive mining process that backs the Bitcoin protocol.

Verge is a proof-of-work blockchain, just like Bitcoin. Proof-of-work blockchains rely on the computational power of miners to verify transactions.

In proof-of-work, miners compete to solve puzzles as soon as possible, and the only way to solve these puzzles is through brute force and luck. The computer that solves the puzzle the fastest receives newly-minted coins, in this case XVG.

While Bitcoin only supports one mining algorithm, Verge supports five: Blake2s, Lyra2rev2, Scrypt, X17 and Myr-groestl.

The blockchain is optimized for payments and private transactions. It supports simple transactions, which are publicly displayed on Verge’s public blockchain explorer, much like a bitcoin transaction.

Unlike the Bitcoin system, and more like Monero’s, Verge also supports stealth transactions. These generate single-use addresses to protect the identity of the receiver. It also supports anonymous transactions, which preserve the anonymity of the sender and the receiver. Verge also integrates Tor for peer-to-peer messaging.

Verge was called DogeCoinDark when it launched in 2014. It was founded by long-time developer Justin Valo (aka “Sunerok” or “Justin Vendetta”).

In 2016, Verge’s community renamed the blockchain to Verge to separate it from the dogecoin meme coin. While the Verge team drives development, it remains a community-driven project.

In April 2018, the blockchain hard-forked to patch an exploit that allowed a Scrypt miner to instantly mine 20 million XVG. Valo said the hack was a “time warp exploit,” where miners misreport timestamps to make it easier to mine new coins.

Verge operates a sponsorship program, Fueled By Verge. It has sponsored National Football League player Malik Williams, Mixed Martial Arts fighter Reena Norville and Motocross racer Jayden Riley.

In September 2021, Binance Pay added support for XVG.