CRYPTO STORY OF THE DAY
Dogecoin (DOGE), an obscure cryptocurrency with a unique culture and community, has seen a rally of about 85% since the beginning of July. It is now the 26th largest crypto by market cap.
DOGE is one of the better representations of crypto’s perceived otherworldliness. Billy Markus from Portland, Oregon created DOGE in 2013, “without much real thought.” He created the coin as a satire of the early alt-coins of the period. Markus has since then moved on from the project and is no longer involved.
DOGE was hard forked from Luckycoin, a Litecoin hard fork. Unlike Litecoin, DOGE’s supply is unlimited and it’s easily minable with basic hardware. As a result, DOGE has a rather strong distribution of nodes geographically, with the U.S. and Germany accounting for about 50%, of the total of 420 active nodes.
The coin also has an active developer community. For example, in 2018, developers released a Dogecoin - Ethereum bridge, allowing for DOGE to be moved to Ethereum and deployed in that ecosystem. The symbol of the coin is the Shiba Inu dog. This symbol stems from Dogecoin’s early days, when it used memes featuring a Shiba Inu to promote the currency and satire other alt-coins. For this reason, DOGE has often been referred to as a "meme currency," The coin’s active ecosystem also features several block explorers and a Dogecoin Foundation.
Dogecoin is also known for above its weight-class marketing, like raising $55,000 to sponsor a Nascar driver or $25,000 to send the Jamaican bobsled team to the Olympics. The coin has been seeing renewed interest in this latest rally, which was capped by yesterday’s announcements that Bitfinex was listing the coin, along with Binance Futures offering a DOGE/USDT perpetual swap.
Dogecoin doesn’t make it easy for one to take it seriously. However, the asset’s continued perseverance speaks to the broader nature of the crypto space. Firstly, DOGE’s rallies, often attributed to viral content - i.e. its original memes and this latest rally’s suggested connection to TikTok videos - show crypto’s attractiveness to a new cohort of investors whose investment decisions will be impacted by new and emerging information/news sources. Secondly, Dogecoin’s most immediate creators, Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, aren’t involved. Along with low barriers of entry to mine Dogecoin using regular CPUs, the network shows signs of authentic decentralization. While the fundamental case for DOGE is far from being well-established it’s disproportionately known by younger generations in social media channels. Whether interest remains as this demographic gets older and grows spending power will be an important question for the future of DOGE.