How to build a 300k community without ICO or marketing tricks: A co-founder of The Verge currency shares his secrets

On March 9, we had a knowledgeable and helpful Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) session on our Twitter about how to create a community-centered blockchain. Our distinguished guest was Justin Valo-Sunerok, the co-founder of The Verge Private Currency. 

You can find a full audio version of the AMA here.

Let’s start with what the Verge Private Currency is and its advantages

Justin has been in crypto since 2010-2011 and started Verge Private Currency back in 2014. The XVG token is a secure and user-friendly community-driven digital currency designed for everyday use. The major Verge Private Currency advantages are low fees, great support, and easy setup.

• Currently, the team is working on ISO 20022 compliance. It is an open global standard for financial information. It’s due “very soon,” Justin said.
• Also, the Verge private currency constantly has partnerships going on and is adding new exchanges all the time. 
• Community-driven means that since 2016, The Verge Private Currency has used polls to decide whether or not to make changes. Every community member gets to vote (not only token holders), and then follow the majority’s decision. 
• The last big voting was back in 2016. The original name was DogeCoinDark, and a lot of people decided they wanted to change the name to Verge.
• This project works without a CEO or a regular management board. It doesn’t have a strict hierarchy. Everyone has their own specialties and works on what they’re good at. Some focus on outreach, while others work on software.
• The team doesn’t make money or keep any coins for themselves; everything is fair and public.
• There are a couple of hundred companies accepting XVG.

“Some currencies are used for really horrible things”

Regulators try to ban or push to the sideboard all the privacy coins like Monero, but the Verge hasn’t had any problems. Some currencies are used for really horrible things, and law enforcement wants to end them. There was an article some years ago about Monero. They said it was banned in Asia because it was being used for something related to children and some sort of horrible operation that was going on. That was illegal. And so is it a good thing that they stopped that operation? Yes. Should they stop the currency and blame them? Absolutely not. So it’s a double-edged sword. 

You can’t blame the currency for the things that people do with it. Criminals are not using credit cards, and they’re not using Bitcoin. They’re using paper money.

Protecting your crypto

Using a Bitcoin wallet from your home office could expose your home IP address to potential hackers, who could then scan for open ports on your network and attempt to breach your security. While Bitcoin transactions are transparent, it’s important to protect user privacy by blocking the user’s IP address from going into the network. That’s what we’re doing. We don’t hide transactions.

“I’m a volunteer”

I’m motivated to work hard on this project because not only have I put a lot of work into it, but also because the people around me are putting in a lot of effort. Somewhere between 50 and 100 people have put their efforts and work into the Verge project. Now [there are] at least 20 to 30 people actively developing the project.

We have tens of thousands of people on our various channels, including 11,000 on Discord (after removing inactive members) and about 10,000 on Telegram. We didn’t use any specific marketing technique to build this community; we just did what we thought was right.

“Neither bull nor bear markets faze us”

At this point, markets that are bear or bull don’t faze us. We get the most work done during bear markets, and I think it’s because everybody’s attention is kind of just on their work. Bull markets can be very distracting; everybody’s looking at charts, numbers, and exchanges, and everything’s going up and everything’s crazy. So we get the most work done during bear markets. One thing I don’t like about bear markets is that you see a lot of people sell at prices lower than they bought for, [in] any cryptocurrency, and they get a bad taste in their mouths. They get upset and think that they were scammed.

A project with no ICO and 300k subscribers without marketing efforts

I didn’t reserve coins for myself to wear later on. People might think that it’s unfair that I have a large amount of coins. We launched publicly, so when the blockchain started at block one, everybody was notified at the same time. There’s no real reason for anybody to think that Verge is unfair in any way. Why we launched without an initial coin offering (ICO) while other projects did? Many people who raise money for their cryptocurrency projects like that will likely go to jail for making false promises and collecting people’s money, which is illegal in the USA. It’s unfair for non-developers to raise money for projects they can’t do themselves. If you want to launch a cryptocurrency, you should be a developer who can do the work without needing money. 

The Verge Private Currency never did any special activities to get people subscribed to their Discord, Twitter, or Telegram channels. But the number of Twitter followers exceeded 300k. Those people joined because they wanted to. The secrets are simple: be honest, don’t trick people, don’t lie, work hard, and build relationships.