I'm no expert in this story but from what I've read/been told ZeroVert was just a scam pump and dump coin. And he is no longer fully associated with VTC, just one of the creators. He expressed interest to help recently, since supposedly he still loves Vertcoin; but allegedly he has created about three pump and dump scam coins before bringing back Zcoin (same code as the original Zerocoin).
Ehhhh he probably watched completely transparent branded Dash/Dark explode after he beat them to confidential transactions.
In addition to their bugscammine & massively cutting inflation post social contract & said "fuck it. I'm gonna get rich." Guess I shouldn't blame him too much.
I've poked around and saw reference to Vert doing the first atomic crosschain transactions with litecoin but couldn't find much else. Any idea who the current devs are and if there is truth to the rumor?
Confidential transactions is actually a specific technology that is patented by Greg Maxwell - a specific technology that neither vtc, drk/dash, zerovert, or zcoin use.
Current devs for vtc are led by James Lovejoy who is a student at MIT blockchain program. There have been no atomic swaps between vtc and ltc so far, but both have activated segwit, and when that feature is implemented in MIT lightning implementation or other implementation I think plan is to quickly test on mainnet.