Dogecoin - what is this?

. But the most interesting thing is that the idea of DOGE came from the famous Internet meme, Doge. It appeared in 2013 and usually looks like this: the picture shows a cute dog of Japanese breed Shiba Inu along with some kind of comic text.

About the project

The founders, Billy Marcus (a programmer from IBM) and Jackson Palmer (an engineer from Adobe) designed Dogecoin as an Internet currency. Unlike the “heavy” and expensive bitcoin, DOGE had a low price, small commissions, and could boast of a high transaction speed. By the way, technically, the project is based on the Litecoin cryptocurrency (a fork of bitcoin with higher block processing speed).

From the “meme cryptocurrency” to the tops of CoinMarketCap

Despite the fact that initially Dogecoin was jokingly called a “meme cryptocurrency”, since its creation the coin has grown in value and, at the moment of writing this article (April 2021), it occupies the 7th place in CoinMarketCap rating with the capitalization of more than $36 billion. This is despite the fact that, about 2 years ago, DOGE capitalization was only $0,39 billion.

This explosive growth has been greatly contributed to by our beloved Elon Musk, who, either jokingly or seriously, regularly publishes tweets dedicated to Dogecoin. But before moving on to the Tesla founder, let's go through some other important facts about the coin.

• Despite the fact that it was originally planned to limit the Dogecoin issue to 100 billion coins, then it was decided to abandon this venture, and today there are already 129 billion coins circulating in the network.
• The creators of the project planned that the coin would be used mainly for donations to content creators and to pay for various goods or services in online stores.
• An important milestone in the history of Dogecoin is charity events. For example, financing the participation of the Jamaican bobsleigh team in the 2014 Winter Olympics, as well as organizing a fundraising campaign for Josh Wise, the pilot of the popular American NASCAR races.
• The project became popular almost immediately, which the creators of the joke currency themselves did not expect. In just 1 month after the launch, more than 1 million new users entered the website dedicated to the project.

Back to Elon Musk

In 2021, interest in Dogecoin flared up with renewed vigor, and the price of a single coin increased by 1500%, thanks to just one person (who, by the way, has 52 million readers).

At the end of 2020, shortly before New Year’s Eve, Elon Musk posted a tweet “One word: Doge”, and described himself as “the former CEO of Dogecoin.”

The joke went well, and the DOGE exchange rate began to rise quickly. But it turned out that Musk's joke (or not a joke) had a sequel. And then Musk's Twitter got a whole series of publications devoted to this coin. Almost every publication caused explosive growth. For example, in February, there was 2 times growth, and after Musk posted that he had bought DOGE for his son, the prices increased by another 18%.

Eventually, Elon went so far as to suggest that people read the word DOGE backwards. What did it turn out to be? “EGOD,” or “Electronic God” - such a discovery made by the genius of the modern age.

All this would be a simple farce of an eccentric entrepreneur, if not for his influence on the coin's economy. Growth of 1500% is something fantastic, for a project that has not announced any new features. Just a few tweets from a famous person, and the rate flies to the moon!

But the most interesting thing is that in addition to the exchange rate, this situation also affected the acceptance of the coin by the general population. For example, now you can buy Dogecoin in 1,8 thousand cryptomats in 45 states of the US.

The First Doge Millionaire

Well, for our final piece, we'd like to talk about how popular people can change not only the future of cryptocurrency but also the life of an individual.

Meet Glauber Contessoto from Los Angeles. In February 2021, he happened to hear about Doge on Reddit and from Elon Musk's posts. An avid fan, Glauber decided to invest his entire fortune, about $180 000, in Doge. After a couple of months, the price of the asset increased several times, and in April the guy had almost $1,1 million in his account!

As Mr. Contessoto himself explained, he did not hesitate at all when making a decision to buy, because he loves Shibu Inu dogs and considers Musk a genius ...

So much for the analysis of the situation ...

Indeed, a lot of things related to Dogecoin sound fantastic. The Jamaican bobsleigh team, Musk's plans to send Doge to the moon, the crazy growth thanks to a couple of tweets, etc.

Someone, like Vitalik Buterin, has been developing his Ethereum project for years and struggling with a ton of problems with scalability, decentralization, and commission size. And someone becomes a millionaire in 2 months by investing in a joke cryptocurrency with a dog meme on the homepage. This shows the diversity of the cryptocurrency community and the unbelievable possibilities of even the most “meme” cryptocurrency in the world.