Dogecoin was originally created as a joke based on the Shiba-Inu (a Japanese breed of dog) meme that was widely shared on social media. The Shiba-Inu named Kabosu was a viral image at the time, and in 2013 two software engineers Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus created cryptocurrency’s first memecoin, aptly naming it Dogecoin - or DOGE for short.

It is based on Litecoin and uses the same proof-of-work consensus mechanism, and actually offers a much faster transaction time than Bitcoin. DOGE is an altcoin that offers P2P payments, meaning it can be used by anyone to send and receive funds. However satirical its origins, DOGE is now listed on over 60 top exchanges and reached the top 10 valued cryptocurrencies in the world. But how did it get there?

The value of anything is largely determined by the amount of people that decide it is valuable. We can track DOGE’s growth through internet meme culture, where in 2020 the TikTok trend ‘DOGE to $1’ started.  The satirical nature of this trend helped in creating the next bubble of new crypto investors as it brought the attention of millions of new people who wanted to jump on the meme. 2021 was where DOGE became a top 10 valued cryptocurrency, this was thanks to the preceding TikTok trend and various high-profile celebrities publicly advocating Dogecoin.

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Huge names like Elon Musk, Mark Cuban and Snoop Dogg frequently began tweeting about DOGE to their combined Twitter audience of 100m+. Cuban even accepted DOGE as a currency to purchase tickets for his NBA team the Dallas Mavericks, and Musk announced that SpaceX (his space exploration company) would be launching a moon-mission completely funded by DOGE. In the stock world this behaviour may have been labelled as market manipulation, but crypto regulations are not yet fully decided so none of these actions were illegal. However, DOGE’s price was affected so much by these social media influencers that in June 2022 a lawsuit was filed against Elon Musk for artificially inflating the price of the coin.

2013 saw a huge surge in popularity for crypto, with various media outlets sending it into mainstream culture. There was much interest in the idea of a digital currency, and Bitcoin saw a huge jump in price from people jumping on the bandwagon. DOGE was firstly created to satirise the idea of crypto changing the world; little did Palmer and Markus know that in less than 10 years later DOGE would have an $85 billion dollar market cap and a community made up of millions.

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This fervour led to a 20,000% increase in price in one year; hitting $0.50 in May 2021. DOGE created the nature of the memecoin, in that a cryptocurrency could be created and actually become valuable through nothing more than internet popularity, and irony, if based on the right meme. Kabosu the Shiba-Inu is an image that will forever be synonymous with crypto, and is a constant reminder of the power of social media on an asset’s value.

A question that people are still asking is ‘does Dogecoin have a future?’ The answer to which is still being determined. The blockchain technology behind DOGE does make it a genuinely faster P2P alternative to Bitcoin or Litecoin, and it also uses less energy (0.12kWh per transaction). There is also a fixed inflation model built into Dogecoin, as a set amount of coins are added to the circulating supply each year. So DOGE has the technology and popularity to become a wider used crypto, but it is somewhat trapped by its jokey origins.