Dogecoin

What it is

Dogecoin is the original meme coin, created in December 2013 by two software engineers, Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, as a joke about the flood of new cryptocurrencies. They paired the code of an existing coin with the era’s favourite internet meme, a Shiba Inu dog, expecting a few weeks of laughs. Instead they created one of the most recognised brands in crypto. One memorable fact: both founders walked away from the project years ago, and Palmer became one of crypto’s more outspoken critics, yet the coin has outlived thousands of projects that took themselves entirely seriously.

How it works

Underneath the jokes, Dogecoin is conventional. It descends from Litecoin’s code, uses proof-of-work mining with the Scrypt algorithm, and confirms blocks about every minute, faster than bitcoin’s ten. Since 2014 it has been merge-mined with Litecoin, meaning miners secure both chains with the same work, which gives Dogecoin far more mining protection than it would attract on its own. Every block mints a fixed 10,000 DOGE, roughly five billion new coins a year with no upper limit. Because that yearly number never grows, the inflation rate falls a little each year, but the supply expands forever, a deliberate choice meant to encourage spending and tipping rather than hoarding.

The story so far

The early community was known for cheerful generosity, funding a Jamaican bobsled team’s trip to the 2014 Winter Olympics and sponsoring the NASCAR driver Josh Wise in the same year. The coin then idled for years until the mania of 2021, when social-media enthusiasm and repeated attention from Elon Musk drove it from a fraction of a cent to just over $0.73 in May 2021 (CoinGecko), briefly making it a top-five asset. The crash that followed was just as dramatic. A revived Dogecoin Foundation now stewards the project, and a small volunteer core team ships occasional releases of the Dogecoin Core software.

Where it stands

As of late July 2026 DOGE ranks eleventh by market value at about $10.7 billion (CoinGecko), trading near $0.07, roughly 90% below its 2021 peak, with about 155 billion coins in circulation. What to watch: whether payment integrations ever catch up with its extraordinary name recognition, the health of the small developer team maintaining the software, and its habit of moving violently on celebrity attention rather than fundamentals. Its 2021 high remains the benchmark against which every later meme coin is measured. Dogecoin remains the market’s purest measure of pure sentiment: it does nothing new, it has never claimed to, and for its holders that has never once been the point.