Dogecoin: from mockery to one of the most valuable cryptocurrencies in the world

The cryptocurrency market is hotter than ever. Major financial institutions are slowly adopting digital wallets, the commercialization of decentralized tokens (NFTs) is insanely valuable for digital art, and recently only bitcoin has outstripped the entire Brazilian Stock Exchange.

However, among all the current stories on the subject, there is something surreal that seems almost unbelievable: the path taken by dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that was born as a joke and remained on the sly for years, as an alternative that few investors take seriously.

Now, thanks to industry heat in general and tweets from a celebrity in particular, it has become one of the most valuable digital currencies on the market.

Origin of Dogecoin

Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency created in late 2013 by two developers: Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer. It started with a big joke, a kind of parody of bitcoin, which is still viewed with great suspicion by a large part of the online community, but also where it has already reached high values.

Markus, an IBM software engineer, created a digital currency project in his spare time, while Palmer was the mastermind behind combining a cryptocurrency with a meme.

In just a few hours in a single day, the duo developed a cryptocurrency from the ground up with the same features and functionality as bitcoin. It amused them as much as it amused them: It was a joke that everything was so simple and almost abstract in this market.

How Dogecoin works is like a simple digital currency: when mining from its own blockchain, you earn a portion of the coin as a “reward” and you can use it for payments in places that accept it. However, it has no defined limit for mining and is simpler in transactions and mining, which can contribute to high levels of inflation and instability even for cryptocurrencies.

Who is the doge?

The theme chosen itself was a great joke: the meme “Doge” is the nickname for a female dog of the Japanese shiba inu breed Kabosu.

It all started with the innocent posting of a photo of Kabosu in which he appears with a calm expression, plump face and crossed front paws. The image quickly went viral and earned rough, colorful captions in Comic Sans font, as if they were the thoughts of the animal written in primitive English.

The name of the meme is misspelled: “Doge” is a variation of the English word “dog”, which means “dog”. The word was born on Reddit forums in 2012 and has become synonymous with images of shiba inus.

With the official establishment of Dogecoin, Markus became the first miner to receive the equivalent of $10,000 and share it with his partner. From that moment on, the project was announced on forums and social networks, reaching dimensions that the creators could never have imagined.

Climax (so far)

The joke gained an air of financial speculation over time, and dogecoin began to gain relative prominence in the cryptocurrency segment, despite being well below bitcoin and ethereum.

In 2014, still in a joking rhythm, dogecoin sponsored a NASCAR team and even led the Jamaican sled team to the Winter Olympics – almost a remake of the movie Jamaica Sub-Zero. It even turned into a simulator game without having to deal with real currency.

Time has passed and dogecoin is back in the news in 2021. There were several reasons for this, and it included some elements that impacted the world economy in the first months of the year: Reddit and Elon Musk.

Musk, the current CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, is one of the most influential names in the technology market, with Twitter posts about cryptocurrencies, among other projects. And he has been talking about dogecoin since 2018, but it was only in 2021 when some text messages sent by the administrator led to the sudden appreciation of the coin.

In addition, he became a kind of “lover” of the TikTok communities and the WallStreetBets subreddit, which upset the investment fund of GameStop.

Doge meme shield (legendary item) pic.twitter.com/CeomU9q84c

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 1, 2021

These groups aimed to take it to the “moon”, a phrase that denotes maximizing Dogecoin to test the limits of financial speculation. Did it work? It has already gained 8,100% in 2021 — in April, the other major cryptocurrencies in the market rose at the same time as the other major cryptocurrencies experienced a historic drop.

But the classic instability of cryptocurrencies also affects dogecoin. At the time of this writing, it lost 43% of its volume in just 24 hours and saw its market capitalization decrease by just over 5%. According to CoinMarketCap, 1 dogecoin is currently equivalent to $0.29.

Years after it was founded, the cryptocurrency that was born as a joke has become serious business and has become a part of the speculative market it wants to parody.

[Atualização – 03/04/2023, às 15h15]: The controversial crypto-active dog shiba inu is back in the spotlight after Twitter owner Elon Musk replaced the traditional symbol of the social network with a photo of the cryptocurrency.

A few minutes after the exchange, the market has already reacted with the news and dogecoin started to gain a lot of value.