Fundamentals

Started in 2018 with an announcement on the bitcointalk forum and no free coins, no funding and no insiders, lead developer Mike Toutonghi launched Verus Coin.

The vision papers were published in the weeks following.

All coins have been fairly mined or staked by a community of enthusiasts with no beneficiary of special position, not even Mike or early contributors. A non-profit foundation was setup to host the code and website. The App Store wallets are published by a Dutch non-profit called Autonomous Software for the sole purpose of publishing to stores.

Consensus

Verus Protocol is a hybrid 50% proof of work and 50% proof of stake coin. It is resistant to 51% hash attacks because needing control of mining power is not enough to cause double spends. The consensus is called Proof of Power (PoP).

Decentralised & Non-custodial Bridges

There is no central authority or intermediary used when moving value across a bridge to or from Verus. No multi-sig committee, pure decentralisation computation, notarization & proofs.

Zero Knowledge Privacy

Privacy receives a lot of fear, uncertainty & doubt (FUD) because the propaganda overstates the use of encryption by criminals.

However, the biggest FUD buster for privacy is the requirement for AI agents to use zero-knowledge proofs for performing work without leaking confidential (or other) information.