Could someone please build a comparative table for Verge and it's major competitors or at least the mains differences. What makes it special
There is a list here of Anon coins:
https://minkiz.co/coin/anonAs for comparison, it's nothing I know of compares the functions etc.
What is I2P?
I2P is an anonymous overlay network - a network within a network. It is intended to protect communication from dragnet surveillance and monitoring by third parties such as ISPs.
I2P is used by many people who care about their privacy: activists, oppressed people, journalists and whistle blowers, as well as the average person.
No network can be "perfectly anonymous". The continued goal of I2P is to make attacks more and more difficult to mount. Its anonymity will get stronger as the size of the network increases and with ongoing academic review.
How does it work?
To anonymize the messages sent, each client application has their I2P "router" build a few inbound and outbound "tunnels" - a sequence of peers that pass messages in one direction (to and from the client, respectively). In turn, when a client wants to send a message to another client, the client passes that message out one of their outbound tunnels targeting one of the other client's inbound tunnels, eventually reaching the destination. Every participant in the network chooses the length of these tunnels, and in doing so, makes a tradeoff between anonymity, latency, and throughput according to their own needs. The result is that the number of peers relaying each end to end message is the absolute minimum necessary to meet both the sender's and the receiver's threat model.
The first time a client wants to contact another client, they make a query against the fully distributed "network database" - a custom structured distributed hash table (DHT) based off the Kademlia algorithm. This is done to find the other client's inbound tunnels efficiently, but subsequent messages between them usually includes that data so no further network database lookups are required.
https://geti2p.net/en/about/introi2P by far offers the most privacy. i2P works like "another internet" and each user contributes to the network, like file sharing, but they do not know the entire content to which they share - kinda like a torrent type of sharing.
This is true anonymity - not compromised, by mixers.
Verge has a heap of resources and a very active Dev, who has worked his butt off.