Jackson Palmer, who was an employee at Adobe at the time, wanted to satirize the proliferation of cryptocurrency at the time, so he added elements of crypto assets to this Doge meme and created a cryptocurrency picture with Doge's avatar. Jackson posted this picture on Twitter and wrote: "Invest in Dogecoin! This will be the next big thing." This post received responses from netizens in both the Meme world and the industry. Under the encouragement of netizens, he bought the domain name dogecoin.com and solicited partners on Twitter who wanted to develop Dogecoin together:
"Investing in Dogecoin, pretty sure it's the next big thing."
This message on Twitter quickly entered the eyes of IBM engineer Billy Markus. He has been studying cryptocurrency and has always hoped to create a cryptocurrency that can be widely used by people instead of simply used for investment.
Billy contacted Jackson. Although Jackson did not respond immediately, Billy began to build Dogecoin. He copied the Bitcoin source code verbatim. Although he could not understand most of it, he made some simple modifications:
1) Change the word Bitcoin to Doge, and change the word mining to dig.
2) Change the currency value from 23 million to 100 billion, and significantly reduce the difficulty of digging holes
3) Change the font to a lively and interesting anime font (comic sans)
It is rumored that the whole process only took about 3 hours. During a lunch break, Billy and Jackson officially launched Dogecoin. It can be said that Jackson created Dogecoin.com, the official portal of Dogecoin, and then Billy developed the first 4 versions of Dogecoin alone.
Two weeks after Dogecoin was born, its daily transaction volume exceeded that of Bitcoin. Less than a month after its birth, the website has received more than 1 million visits! Later, he became popular again in Taiwan with the song "I always recommend breaking up when it comes to relationships".
Picture source network
In 2014, Billy and Jackson withdrew from the development of Dogecoin one after another. The reason is unknown. It is speculated that Dogecoin was still worthless at that time, because even the founders themselves said in an interview: "We think this is a big joke that is destined to die." It seems that they don't have any left in their hands.
Later, a new Dogecoin core development team was formed. This team consists of a core maintainer team and has been supported by more than 40 contributors over the years. Dogecoin has been developed and maintained by them since then.
However, compared to the "value investment" investors in the Bitcoin circle, Dogecoin is a bit of a slap in the face, because it was worthless in the first few years, and later it had a market value of tens of billions of dollars. Maybe the existence of some things is valuable in itself, but gold needs time to shine?
The opportunity is that Dogecoin has gradually become the reward currency of the famous American online forum Reddit. Because it is cheap, it is favored by a large number of netizens and celebrities. It can also be regarded as the first practical scenario for benchmarking.
At that time, a Reddit netizen wrote a tipping bot. When a netizen shared great content, he could tip the bot and send 5 Dogecoins to the author to express his gratitude.
At that time, each Dogecoin was worth about US$0.0005. Although the value was not much, more importantly, it was a sense of honor. Some people even said: "Getting a tip of 5 Dogecoins is more satisfying than receiving 2 cents (US$0.02)."
Despite originating as a joke, the low price coupled with ease of purchase makes it easier for those interested in cryptocurrencies to get involved. As a result, Dogecoin’s user base has expanded rapidly, increasing its value as a cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency infrastructure, mining pools, and trading services were also born at the same time. And Dogecoin quickly developed a large and passionate cryptocurrency community, doing some great causes and charities.
For example, in 2014, the Dogecoin community raised 26.5 million Dogecoins (worth about $30,000 at the time) to support the Jamaican bobsled team to participate in the Sochi Winter Olympics. In March 2014, the Dogecoin community raised more than 40 million Dogecoins (worth approximately $30,000 at the time) to help build clean water wells in Kenya. The Dogecoin Foundation also collaborated with popular YouTubers Mr Beast and Mark Rober on the TeamSeas initiative, which raised $30 million for ocean debris removal.
To this day, Dogecoin’s official website still has relevant introductions.
Dogecoin also has a very unique concept. If Bitcoin is a rebellion against the traditional financial system, then it is a rebellion against Bitcoin. One of its main features that is completely opposite to Bitcoin is: Bitcoin has a fixed total amount and no additional issuance, while DOGE has an initial amount of 100 billion, with unlimited additional issuance at 5% per year. That is, 5 billion Dogecoins are issued every year, and the supply is unlimited. Another attractive feature of Dogecoin is its low entry fee. One Bitcoin is worth tens of thousands of US dollars, even in the bear market, it is beyond the reach of ordinary people. However, the value of one Dogecoin is less than US$1, and the transaction fees are relatively low, which is attractive to investors with limited funds. In addition, as the popularity of Dogecoin increases, more and more trading platforms have announced that they can buy, sell or manage Dogecoin.
You see, Dogecoin was originally used as a reward on the famous American online forum Reddit. Later, Dogecoin developed into a charity. Dogecoin can then be exchanged for other cryptocurrencies on multiple trading platforms for investment purposes. It is worth mentioning that there are already 1,400+ stores around the world that accept customers to pay in Dogecoin, and even Musk announced that he will accept Dogecoin to pay for the SpaceX moon landing mission.
Up to now, Dogecoin has jumped to become the seventh largest cryptocurrency in the world, but who would have thought that the inspiration came from a photo of Kabosu, a Shiba Inu, that appeared online in 2010!
02 Price jumps repeatedly
The risk of investing in Dogecoin is very high, because its price will change dramatically due to market sentiment. It may rise sharply or plummet in a short period of time, which is highly speculative. In particular, Musk's words and deeds have a great impact on the price of Dogecoin. At the beginning of last year, he tweeted in support of Dogecoin, causing its price to soar hundreds of times. Later, due to his remarks that Dogecoin was a scam, the price of Dogecoin plummeted.
Here, Vernacular Blockchain will also take you to review the violent fluctuations of Dogecoin.
The first major infusion of Dogecoin came into the crypto market around March 10, 2017, following a massive increase in retail investment, which boosted the prices of all altcoins. In a span of 70 days, the “funny” cryptocurrency rose from $0.00021 to a peak of $0.0042, a gain of more than 1,890%. This shattered the previous all-time high of $0.0021, sending the market cap soaring by $423 million. Shortly afterwards, Dogecoin plummeted 75% in a two-week market correction, which in turn affected all cryptocurrency prices.
By November 2017, there was another strong buying momentum in the cryptocurrency market, with huge trading volumes pushing Bitcoin to a high of $19,783. The global cryptocurrency market value has reached a staggering US$830 billion, which has also driven the parabolic growth of small-market value projects such as Dogecoin.
On January 7, 2018, Dogecoin broke through $0.02, 380% higher than its previous high. Its current market capitalization is US$1.6 billion. However, this rally was very short-lived, with the price falling by more than 70% in 8 days, back to $0.0047.
The Third: Crypto Market Rally
On April 14, 2018, just before the entire market entered the “crypto winter” and fell to previous lows, the vast majority of crypto projects experienced a brief recovery. In three days, Dogecoin rose from $0.0020 to $0.0041, an increase of 103%. In comparison, Bitcoin only gained 40% in the same month. But it didn’t take long for Dogecoin’s market value to drop by more than half from its all-time high.
In September 2018, the first major rally in Dogecoin that was largely unrelated to the rest of the crypto market, system testing of the Dogecoin/Ethereum bridge was completed.
This bridge is considered a new update that will allow interoperability between the two blockchains. The announcement reignited community support for the project, and the price of Dogecoin increased by 173% in 48 hours. However, it was later learned that due to the plummeting price of Ethereum, there was not enough funds to continue developing the bridge, so the update was put on hold. Since then, no one has mentioned whether the bridge between Dogecoin and Ethereum will continue. The price of Dogecoin has also recovered.
Fifth time: Tiktok becomes popular
In mid-2020, a viral video on Tiktok caused a chain reaction, triggering a sharp rise in the price of Dogecoin.
A TikTok netizen launched a challenge called #DogecoinTikTok#, encouraging netizens on the platform to buy Dogecoin and raise its price to $1 each. Some netizens calculated that if all 800 million TikTok users spend $25 to buy Dogecoin, then when Dogecoin rises to $1, each of them will earn $10,000.
There is no doubt that the hype from TikTok netizens has pushed up the price of Dogecoin. As the hype intensified, Dogecoin was trading at more than 2.5 times what it was a few weeks ago. Then it gradually fell back.
On January 11, 2021, the traditional financial market was severely disrupted by a subreddit forum called WallStreetBets (aka WSB). These amateur stock investors decided to band together against traditional financial institutions and launched stocks such as GameStop, BlackBerry, AMC, Nokia and Bed Bath & Beyond that major hedge funds were betting would lose value.
On January 28, WSB stock market mania spread to Dogecoin and drove a sharp rebound in the cryptocurrency. In less than two days, Dogecoin surged to an all-time high of $0.087 on Binance, a gain of 1,100%. The surge was driven in part by several tweets, including one from Musk.
But later Musk said in an interview that Dogecoin was a scam, and then the price plummeted…
Seventh time: Musk’s tweet
On April Fools' Day, April 1, 2021, Musk said that he would use SpaceX to bring a Dogecoin to the moon.
As soon as the news came out, Dogecoin went straight up
rose, rising 15% that day. Since then, Dogecoin has started a rapid rise mode: after breaking through 0.1 US dollars on April 14, it hit a record high price of 0.43 US dollars on April 19, and the currency price soared 336% in just one week. According to data from CoinMarketCap, its total market capitalization reached $50 billion on April 20, surpassing Ford Motor Co.
On May 5, the price of Dogecoin rose sharply again, exceeding US$0.68 during the session. The 24-hour increase once exceeded 50%, setting another record high. As of May, the market value was approximately US$88 billion, making it the fourth largest cryptocurrency at the time after BTC, ETH and BNB. Its price later dropped as the tweet’s popularity declined.
Dogecoin has enjoyed a parabolic surge over the last week, during which time Dogecoin has climbed from approximately $0.06 to nearly $0.15, a percentage gain that far outpaces Bitcoin’s performance.
The direct reason is that Musk, a long-term supporter of Dogecoin, spent $44 billion to acquire Twitter.
Looking back since its birth, the price of Dogecoin has soared from less than US$0.0001 in 2013 to US$0.74 in May 2021, a surge of hundreds of times, and then plummeted. The price of Dogecoin fluctuates greatly, so it is not suitable for investors looking for stable returns.
To sum up, it must be said that Musk is indeed a key figure to Dogecoin. It can be seen that although there has been an increase from 2017 to 2020, the overall fluctuations are not large. Since Musk's intervention in 2021, Dogecoin has started a roller coaster-like price trend. If dogs are man’s best friend, then for the famous Dogecoin, the best friend must be Musk.
03 Issues that cannot be ignored
In the huge market of more than 5,000 cryptocurrencies, Dogecoin is a special existence. We know that the birth of Dogecoin is completely a black humor. It just originated from Billy and Jackson's copycat of Bitcoin in 2013, and then it accidentally became popular. But I didn’t expect that because of the price, it would develop into the “behemoth” it is today.
If the price rise and fall is a major attraction and advantage of Dogecoin, then these existing problems may give you a more comprehensive and clear understanding of Dogecoin.
1. Development has stalled and the code has not been updated for a long time.
Few people know that before Musk made Dogecoin popular, Dogecoin’s blockchain development was more sporadic than other blockchain projects. In the past few years, its basic code maintenance has almost stagnated. The last major development of Dogecoin was back on November 8, 2019, and there were no updates to the project code between November 10, 2015, and February 4, 2018. As recently as last month, news broke that the Dogecoin development team is currently working on two major versions – core updates 1.14.7 and 1.21, but they should not be implemented yet.
2. Almost no ecosystem, limited application scenarios
In addition to being used as a reward medium on Reddit once before, Dogecoin as a payment method is not widely used at present. According to some reports, only 1,300 companies may accept Dogecoin as a payment method by 2021, and this unremarkable achievement took eight years. There are now approximately 40,000 transactions being transferred on the Dogecoin blockchain every day, which is less than a fraction of the number of daily transactions on Visa and Mastercard.
Source: https://explorer.viawallet.com
