By Wendy Clack, Andrew Hayward and Stephen Graves
8 min read
What happens when a joke gets taken seriously? In 2013, Dogecoin (DOGE) was created as a way to poke fun at the crypto industry; now it's one of the world's biggest cryptocurrencies. How did it get to this point?
Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency that takes its name from the "doge" Internet meme. It started as a way to mock the crypto industry, but quickly built up a lively community of enthusiasts.
It has come a long way since 2013; during the 2021 crypto bull run, it briefly hit a market cap of $88 billion. Dogecoin celebrated its 10th anniversary on December 6th, 2023.
Jackson Palmer, an Adobe employee, couldn’t believe the huge number of altcoins that were popping up in 2013. As a joke, he sent out a tweet saying he was investing in Dogecoin—a fake coin based on a popular meme featuring a Shiba Inu dog.
Even though he tweeted in jest, several people thought he was on to something. They said the industry really needed a light-hearted token that could counter the more controversial coins on offer. So Palmer teamed up with Billy Markus, a programmer, to make Dogecoin a reality.
“It was always like a hobby project, like a side project thing,” Palmer told Decrypt in 2018. But a community quickly formed around the cryptocurrency, and took it much further than Palmer had anticipated.
The upside of Dogecoin’s never-ending supply of tokens is that the price stays relatively stable. The downside is that the price usually remains very low. Most people get into the crypto world as an investment. They hope that if they hang onto certain tokens long enough, they can sell for a profit.
Not so with Dogecoin. Since the token supply is high and the price is low, it’s not attractive to investors looking to hold onto their currency. The result is a highly liquid, free-flowing peer-to-peer digital currency.
A key use of Dogecoin is as an online tipping system. If you like what someone posted in the Dogecoin Reddit community, throw them some Dogecoin. It’s part of what gives the community its friendly reputation.
You can also trade it for other cryptocurrencies on several exchanges, which has made the currency an unlikely medium by which people hop from one exchange to another.
For something that started out as a joke, Dogecoin has established a legitimate reputation. The community's philanthropic endeavors quickly caught the attention of the media; Dogecoin fans sponsored NASCAR driver Josh Wise in 2014, funded the Jamaican bobsled team at the 2014 Winter Olympics, and later raised thousands for a Kenyan water charity.
Co-founder Jackson Palmer isn't a fan of how seriously people take Dogecoin; he left in 2015, after scammers fleeced the fun-loving members of the Dogecoin community. At the time, he said too many people were jumping in with a ‘get rich quick’ mentality, missing the token’s purpose.
When Dogecoin briefly hit a $2 billion market cap in January 2018, Palmer remained critical. He stated, “I think it says a lot about the state of the cryptocurrency space in general that a currency with a dog on it which hasn’t released a software update in over 2 years has a $1B+ market cap.”
Dogecoin picked up steam once again in 2020; partly thanks to the emergence of a new social media platform that traffics in memes. In July 2020, a viral TikTok challenge encouraged users of the app to invest in the cryptocurrency, briefly causing the price to soar—to the point where the official Dogecoin account had to weigh in, cautioning people to "Stay safe. Be smart."
At the same time, Dogecoin found a celebrity fan in billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who began tweeting about the cryptocurrency—though he later clarified that he was talking in jest.
Musk may have been joking on that occasion, but he has put Dogecoin to practical use at times; in May 2021, he announced that his space exploration firm SpaceX would launch a “Doge-1” satellite to the Moon, “paid for in Doge.”
The Tesla CEO’s tweets also appear to have moved the market for Dogecoin. After Musk tweeted “One word: Doge” in December 2020, the price of Dogecoin shot up by 17%, from $0.0039 to $0.0046. In February 2021, he criticized Dogecoin’s wealth distribution; the price subsequently plunged by 20%. And following Musk’s purchase of Twitter in October 2022, the social media site briefly changed its logo to the Doge meme in April 2023; Dogecoin surged by over 20%.
Matters came to a head in June 2023, when Musk, Tesla and SpaceX were hit with a $258 billion lawsuit alleging that they engaged in a racketeering scheme to manipulate the price of the cryptocurrency. Musk has sought to have the lawsuit dismissed, with his lawyers calling it a “fanciful work of fiction” based on his “innocuous and often silly tweets” about the cryptocurrency.
Perhaps inevitably, Dogecoin's success has inspired imitators. Other so-called "meme coins" have sprung up, including Pepe (PEPE), Shiba Inu Coin (SHIB) and Bonk (BONK).
In August 2021, the Dogecoin Foundation was re-established, with advisory board members including Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, Dogecoin co-founder Billy Markus, Dogecoin core developer Max Keller and Neuralink CEO Jared Birchall.
May 2023 saw the launch of the DRC-20 token standard, allowing for the creation of "Doginals," a unique digital asset akin to non-fungible tokens and based on Bitcoin Ordinals. The launch of the new standard saw Dogecoin transactions soar to a new all-time high, though some core developers were skeptical of the prospects of the feature, arguing that it “has not had enough thought given to it.”
While Dogecoin's devs are knuckling down to the long-term goal of turning the meme coin into a fully-functioning everyday currency, many latter-day meme coins are open about the fact that they're taking a more trial-and-error approach; in SHIB's case, it bills itself as "an experiment in decentralized spontaneous community building."
Others don't see the funny side; in June 2020, Thailand's Securities and Exchange Commission ordered crypto exchanges to delist meme coins (alongside NFTs and social tokens), defining them as tokens that have “no clear objective or substance or underlying [value],” and whose price relies on social media trends.
Whether Dogecoin itself is here to stay—or whether it's destined to flame out as it did after its 2018 peak—is open to debate. But, as the Dogecoin community says, in the end one thing is immutable: 1 DOGE = 1 DOGE.
Throughout its lifespan, the Dogecoin community has remained active and loyal. If proponents’ goal of turning Dogecoin into a bona fide (or 'bona fido', perhaps?) currency for transacting in succeeds, it could very well stick around long into the future. Wow.
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