I would agree with you.. This reminds me of Verge where it was going through the same phase before it lost steam (and seems to continue that trajectory)... I still remember when it was 1-2 cents in Dec. Then John McAfee's tweet and all the hype and it jumps as high to about 29 cents (Dec 23). This is the same coin that has not made much impact since its inauguration of 2014. The development team could not met their roadmap deadlines and then hyped that it is a privacy coin (let alone the rebranding of the coin in 2016). All this add up to a pump and dump that people just listen to the hype and not the reality of the coin. Please note that Wraith is not an easy installation (only available with Mac only) and their protocol (and privacy) has come to be questioned. With all this, why the hype on Verge? It all points to a lot of hype after McAfee tweet and reality showing that Verge is not making the grade (today a cryptocurrency was going up but Verge is still going down and at 13.4 cents)
Reference: https://medium.com/@MartinRosulek/how-cryptocurrency-verge-pushes-privacy-and-anonymity-to-the-next-level-4b367e16a8a4
https://news.bitcoin.com/privacy-coin-verge-allegedly-leaking-users-ip-addresses/
http://bitcoinist.com/faith-wraith-misplaced-verge/
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