Early May Update: Technicals

XVGBTC daily chart looks anemic as XVG struggles to hold its long-term support zone at around 150 sats, falling back to the current 119 satoshis. Trading volume is feeble and there is almost no buzz around XVG on social media and media outlets in general – all portents of a dying project. As we mentioned it multiple times, 2019 will be the beginning of the purge of nonsensical projects where XVG certainly belongs.

Trading volume is puny – reported volume in the last 24hrs is $3m and “Real 10” (trading volume on the exchanges that provably prevent wash trading) volume is even lower – $1.4m. This means that XVG’s liquidity is moderately inflated and its trading volume is overstated by 2.2x which is comparatively great ratio.

Moreover, XVG has a somewhat strong buy support, according to coinmarketbook.cc. Buy support is measuring sum of buy orders at 10% distance from the highest bid price. This way we can eliminate fake buy walls and whale manipulation and see the real interest of the market in a certain coin. XVG currently has a $662k of buy orders measured with this method, which sets XVG buy support/market cap ratio at 0.56%, a shade above of market average. Bitcoin and Ethereum have a 0.27% and 0.28% ratios, respectively. This novel metric indicates there are a lot of manipulations, inflated liquidity and fake orders on all crypto trading pairs, including XVG pairs.

To assess fundamental health of a project, we used the FCAS metric. FCAS is a comparative metric whose score is derived from the interactivity between primary project lifecycle fundamentals: User Activity, Developer Behavior, and Market Maturity.

There are a few sub components which provide data to each fundamental:
User Activity is comprised of Project Utilization and Network Activity
Developer Behavior is comprised of Code Changes, Code Improvement and Community Involvement
Market Maturity is comprised of Liquidity and Market Risk. Market Maturity has less than 5% impact on a project’s overall FCAS.


FCAS ratings are on a 0-1000 point scale with a corresponding letter grade. Break points are based on standard deviations in the underlying component distributions.

900 – 1000 is marked as S for superb. 750 – 899 is marked as A for attractive. 650 – 749 is marked as B for basic. 500 – 649 is marked as C for caution. And finally, below 500 is marked as fragile. You can read more about it here.

Verge has been surprisingly ranked as the A category – attractive with overall 767 points as of May 7th. The strongest metrics that contributed to this great score are developer activity that got 778 points, topped by user activity with 780 and market maturity that had 641 points.

Below are some of the most important news around the project in the last 30 days.

Below is our long-term forecast where we cover general market movements and sentiment shifts before delving deeper into the specific predictions for XVG.

Dogecoin Dark was created in September 2014 with the two-pronged goal of maximum anonymity and true decentralization. Almost two years after launching Dogecoin Dark, the team re-branded to Verge with the same privacy and decentralization goals.

Verge (XVG) had a pretty terrible year, in all aspects: price-wise, tech wise but also business wise.

Major news of the year was the bought partnership (they solicited funds from their followers on Twitter, to help them “accelerate the crowdsourcing effort”) with PornHub, back in April 2018. But not long after that, Verge blockchain was attacked two times, tarnishing coin’s reputation beyond reparable.

Here is a nice recap of Verge’s terrible security breaches and poorly implemented privacy features:

“In April 2018, a bug in the retargeting of the algorithms got exploited using a 51% attack. Using spoofed timestamps, the need for a different algorithms each block was circumvented and the hackers were able to submit blocks to the chain at a high speed, mining 1 block per second (!) effectively ruling out 99% of the legit pools, which were losing money.

In May 2018 the same thing happened but with a different approach: hackers sent one block with Scrypt algorithm containing a spoofed timestamp followed by a block with Lyra2re algorithm containing a spoofed timestamp and by repeating that process and thus lowering the difficulty, the hackers were able to mine several blocks per minute.

They had first official meetup in June.

In September, Verge (XVG) was added to The Crypto Planet and Bitnovo, followed by addition to NetCents. Token was also added to some minor exchanges during the year.

Verge is still working on their wallets to include actual privacy features, so the current versions are far from the final product.

The downfall of altcoins that were mainstream media darlings at the start of the year, XVG among them, can be attributed, in part, to novice investors getting scared off once the bear market kicked in with a vengeance. Every resurgence of bitcoin in recent period, was met with the, for the most part, inability of altcoins to rally with it. Reason for that can be rookie investors learning from their mistakes, while smart money that was previously watching from the sidelines has begun to enter into bitcoin.

Read also: Stellar XLM Price Prediction for 2019

These entities weren’t about to buy BTC when it was trading at an all-time high, but they’ll take a look now, having missed the boat the first time around. None of them, it seems, are interested in altcoins however, despite the fact that many are trading at a 5x discount. Institutional investors may be cautious, but they’re not foolish.

We should consider crypto valuations like educated gambling, a ‘prediction market’ where we are betting on the odds of project and token success. There are some catalysts of success we can identify:

Real user traction is the most important driver of success, that is what most of holders call “adoption”. If people start using certain crypto project because they find it useful and it makes their life easier, that is a guarantee of success. So far, almost no crypto project can claim to have done so.

Strong financial warchest that will enable teams behind the project to develop their visions, incentivize other developers to join them and start using their product is also a crucial aspect of any project. Tied into it is treasury management – especially for the project that had big ICO proceeds. Temptation to squander all those millions into “conferences and events” (read hard-core partying on yachts and luxury hotels) was massive, especially if we consider that majority of token projects founders were no-names and ordinary employees that worked for a paycheck before the ICO fairy-tale happened to them.

Another adoption indicator – network effects, where every additional user of a good or service adds to the value of that product to others. When a network effect is present, the value of a product or service increases according to the number of others using it.

If you can objectively notice that your favorite token project has some of these traits happening for it, be happy – you might have found a winner.

Token success is completely dependent on tokenomics. As defined by infloat.co, tokenomics involves the incentivization of certain stakeholders to ensure particular behavior.

So, tokenomics is essentially an incentive structure designed to ensure that a token has a purpose and utility within its native network. It is the study of how coins/tokens work within the broader ecosystem that can be considered as a sovereign micro-economy. This includes such things like token distribution as well as how they can be used to incentivize positive behaviour in the network.

For example, bitcoin is designed to ensure that bitcoin miners have a reason to mine new bitcoin. Miners validate bitcoin transactions and receive (or create) newly minted bitcoin in the process.

On the other hand, individuals, businesses and other bitcoin users pay a transaction fee for miners to include their transaction in the next block. This ensures that even when all bitcoin have been minted (to the tune of 21 million, which should happen in around 2140), bitcoin miners are still incentivized to keep ‘mining’ (i.e. validating transactions).

To paraphrase all of the above in the simplest terms: if you, after weeks of research and reading, can’t figure out why the project needs to have a token, it probably doesn’t.

So why does the token exist then?

– To make the project founders rich.

But there are some people on Twitter, Reddit, Telegram claiming otherwise.

-Yes, they are either: paid to do so by those same founders, they are desperate and delusional bad holders or they are just stroking their own ego with newly learned fancy economic terms and jargon.

Needless to say – stay clear of such projects.

XVG, as the rest of the market, is tied at the hip of bitcoin’s price action. If bitcoin embarks on another bull run, XVG can hope for one as well. Since that is very unlikely, don’t expect much to change for XVG price-wise in this year. So 2019 will be a year of boring sideways action with minor bitcoin ignited jumps and slumps.

In general:

The main currency in cryptocurrency markets is Bitcoin and given this, altcoins tend to fuel Bitcoin runs and Bitcoin tends to do the same in return. Given this relationship, Bitcoin price movements (or lack thereof) tend to effect altcoin prices.

When Bitcoin goes up swiftly, it will likely:

In cases when Bitcoin plunges, it will likely:

When Bitcoin moves sideways, it will likely:

To summarize, Bitcoin is the focal point of the crypto market in many ways, and with BTC trading pairs on every exchange, the gravity of Bitcoin is hard to evade.

The vast majority of trading that occurs in the crypto markets are between BTC and altcoin trading pairs. Since most altcoins do not pair with fiat currencies (and only a few are paired with stable coins like USTD), Bitcoin is the next best option. Therefore, when Bitcoin is stable, it forms as the ideal base currency for buying altcoins (which is why altcoins tend to do well when Bitcoin goes sideways).

Correlation is measured on a scale from -1 to 1. Values above 0 shows the degree to which altcoin is moving in the same direction as BTC prices (either up or down in tandem), and values below 0 shows the degree to which altcoin moves in the opposite direction of BTC prices (so when BTC goes down, altcoin goes up, or vice versa). Values around 0 shows that when BTC price moves, altcoins stays steady, or alternatively that when altcoin moves up or down that the BTC price is staying steady.

Based on the correlation analysis, BTC and XVG have a strong positive relationship. The correlation coefficient of their prices is 0.56, which was calculated based on the previous 100-days’ price dynamics of both currencies.

The majority of projects will fail — some startups are created just to gather funds and disappear, some would not handle the competition, but most are just ideas that look good on paper, but in reality, are useless for the market. 

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum said:

“There are some good ideas, there are a lot of very bad ideas, and there are a lot of very, very bad ideas, and quite a few scams as well”

As a result, over 95% of successful ICOs and cryptocurrency projects will fail and their investors will lose money. The other 5% of projects will become the new Apple, Google or Alibaba in the cryptoindustry. Will XVG be among those 5%?

Highly unlikely!

XVG is like a twin brother of TRX – a lot of hype and little substance in the project. The team managed to build strong, cultish community but prolonged bear market dissipated it and XVG circles are real shipwrecks these days.

Two 51% attacks exposed the incompetence of their team which disqualifies them from the role they had in late 2017, early 2018: they were one of the most suitable coins for pumps and dumps. Nowadays, pump and dumps are much harder to organize and there are coins that project a better brand image than Verge, making them a better candidate for the pump and dump conductors.

All of this means that XVG will remain in its zombie phase, perhaps even officially die and get buried along many other worthless altcoins.

All of this summed up means one thing: XVG might live through couple of orchestrated and, for a regular trader, completely unpredictable pumps but the majority of time will be murky sideways trading with small volume and no significant interest from the market. 

Price will heavily depend on what BTC will do and since many analysts think BTC will not be making big moves in this year, it is hard to expect XVG will do them either. The price will probably stagnate and record slow-moving depreciation or appreciation depending on the team activity, potential technological breakthrough or high-level partnership.

A new roadmap was released back in October and it contains several upcoming project milestones. In typical Verge fashion, none of the roadmap points have any set dates on them, thus avoiding the responsibility of being called out on more potentially missed deadlines. Even with such a vague roadmap they added an addendum “in spirit of transparency and good faith”, claiming that these plans and milestones are subject to change based on “priorities, unplanned developments and new ideas.

While no actual dates were provided, the roadmap at least gives a general idea of how close certain milestones are to completion. According to the roadmap:

With the market being completely unpredictable, forecasting the cryptocurrency price is really more of a gamble and luck rather than a data driven guesstimate.

Let’s throw a glance at the eminent publications and personalities, and their predictions regarding the Verge (XVG) price, which will give us another point of view to consider:

Algorithm at cryptoground.com sees some green color in the second part of this year for XVG, predicting it reaches $0.0281 by the end of the year.

One of the best crypto market analysis site, walletinvestor.com forecasts that verge coin might reach up to $0.138 by the end of 2019. They even stated that in 5 years, XVG might go up by 2-3%.

According to this predicting algo, XVG might hit $0.7401 by 2020 (Verge Coin price prediction 2020). They even added that by 2023, Verge might reach $2.39.

Coin Fan predicts that by the end of 2019, XVG might reach as much as $0.172 and on the lower side, it can reach $0.127.By 2020, XVG might reach somewhere between $0.45 to $0.61, as per Coin Fan Predictions.

This website predicts that XVG might reach $0.0257 by the end of 2019 and might reach $0.043 by 2022. It even shows a fall in price in 2023 and predicts that XVG price might get devalued to $0.041.

Trading Beasts predict that XVG might reach around $0.05 towards the end of 2019. This forecast is a very pessimistic one. They even stated that by 2020, XVG might be somewhere around $0.07.

The post Verge (XVG) Price Prediction 2019 – The Purge of No Value Coins Has Begun (Early May Update) appeared first on CaptainAltcoin.

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