A brief history of Dogecoin
Dogecoin was officially launched in December 2013 in the USA by Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus, who wanted to harness the peer-to-peer capabilities of Bblockchain by creating a cryptocurrency centred around community.
If all that sounds very serious, Palmer and Markus have gone on record saying that they intended to start Dogecoin as a cheeky dig at crypto giant Bitcoin. As such, they chose for the face of their brand the canine mug that launched a thousand memes: the famous ‘Doge’. And so Dogecoin was born – the very first ‘meme cryptocurrency’.
Dogecoin quickly made use of social media to punt the new coin, primarily Twitter and Reddit – and later TikTok. Dogecoin has also benefitted significantly from tweets and other social media references by names such as GameStop, Snoop Dogg and Kiss’ Gene Simmons.
The crypto has displayed a canny wielding of popular culture. Some of their more prominent publicity stunts included sponsoring the Jamaican bobsled team at the 2014 Olympics in homage to the Cool Runnings movie and funding a SpaceX mission. In fact, Elon Musk has promised to literally take Dogecoin ‘to the moon’ in physical coin form.
In 2015, the Dogecoin community experienced a big shock when Palmer left the fold, pronouncing it ‘toxic’.
Still, Dogecoin’s star was on the rise. By 2017, the cryptocurrency was definitely not a joke anymore, having achieved a market value of $2 billion. And, from 2017 to 2019, the world increasingly turned to any and every cryptocurrency in what has since been dubbed the ‘crypto bubble’ period.
By 2 June 2021, Dogecoin had temporarily reached a market cap of over $50 billion – larger than that of Twitter at the time – and a market value of more than $9 billion. However, at the time of writing this article (1 December 2021) Dogecoin has yet to reach its ultimate goal of being valued at $1 per coin.
