It can't be further away from Verge. There was no hype, just Reddit and regular user shilling. No McAfee proclamations, dev team is not anonymous and lead dev is a highly regarded systems engineer, they've met all their goals and have a working product which so far has performed as expected. Unlike other coins there was no pre-mine or ICO, it probably has one of the fairest distributions of any top 50 coin. You only need 500 coins to be in the top 10k wallets.
XRB is the furthest thing from a pump and dump.
There is a lot of hype... I am being realistic.. I have been researching on Verge for the past month and even before John McAfee.. I was very interested in buying the coin because of their marketing.. So I did additional researching.. Their prize focus was Wraith protocol. That was supposed to be announced after Nov 25. Though I give credit is due with their completion of Stage 1 (Core Wallet 3.0), Stage 2 has not been completed still. They got Wraith out recently but it is only available for Mac (12/31/2017). Though I can't say the development team is good or not, I do see is that they are having a hard time meeting deadlines. At the end, the Wraith protocol that came out could be flawed and not working to expectation. Also, consider the history of the coin... It was rebranded from Dogecoindark. If the development team was solid, I would ask the history of of the coin since 2014... These are flags... Could it succeed? Quite possibly. But the track records are showing otherwise.. John McAfee did not help (after he promoted it)... You could make an educated guess for yourself