Dogecoin | Started as a meme and now we’re here

Kaveen Senarathne
IMPACT
Published in
3 min readFeb 10, 2021

If you’ve spent a decent amount of time on social media, you probably would’ve heard of Dogecoin.

A picture of Dogecoins from software engineering daily

What is it?

The “doge” is a popular meme on the internet featuring the face of a Shiba Inu dog, and Dogecoin, is a crypto currency created by Billy Markus, an IBM software engineer, and Jackson Palmer, an Adobe software engineer, as a joke!

Dogecoin is a decentralized, peer-to-peer digital currency that enables users to easily send money online.

Dogecoin is used with a wallet. user can access to this wallet with their computer or smartphone. As a crypto currency, it can be utilized for any transactions and it is present in a lot of major platforms.

Crypto currencies are becoming increasingly popular throughout the world. Crypto is going up a lot in general and people are moving into invest in crypto than stock market due to inflation as governments artificially pump trillions of dollars for the stimulus packages due to the COVID-19 pandemic. And many other reasons.

Dogecoin’s value has gone up over 800% in the past couple of weeks. It was valued at less than one penny not very long ago but since the value has gone up to 8 cents now (at the time of writing), Dogecoin has gained $10 billion dollars in market capital.

A picture of Dogecoin price index and live chart from CoinDesk

There is lot of support, and demand for doge coin in general, as people are pushing it to that $1 value. And now we have Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet, joining in. More and more celebrities like Snoop Dogg, Gene Simmons are also supporting this and big YouTubers are also talking about this. Furthermore, there are rumors that they going to telecast a Dogecoin ad in the Super Bowl which is huge.

A meme that shows elon musk is endorsing Dogecoin, which he has shared on twitter himself

Will Doge become $1?

Dogecoin has a circulating supply of 128 billion coins and this total amount of coins available will not change creating a concrete total supply. Combined with the growing popularity of crypto currencies, it is entirely possible for it to hit the $1 target.

As of now the Dogecoin market capital is $10 billion. If it hits the $1 target, that will be a massive increase in market capital for them.

The future of crypto currency

There’s a strong possibility that crypto currency will become a multi trillion market relatively soon, with a large number of new investors jumping in as more people become aware of it.

Now we are seeing institutions rush into the crypto space but, they are mostly only buying Bitcoins at the moment. Tesla bought $1.5 billion in Bitcoin recently and they are planning to accept Bitcoin as a payment method as well.

However, it’s a very high risk investing in coins like this at the peak of their speculation. Everyone is talking about and buying Dogecoin right now thinking it will continue to go up in value but that’s not a guarantee.

Investing in crypto currency has to be done with caution and a good understanding of the volatile nature of it. If you’re planning on investing, make sure you’re qualified in these areas.

references

2021. [online] Available at: <https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/08/tweets-from-elon-musk-and-celebrities-send-dogecoin-to-a-record-high.html> [Accessed 10 February 2021].

CoinDesk. 2021. Dogecoin Price Index — Real-time Dogecoin (DOGE) Price Charts. [online] Available at: <https://www.coindesk.com/price/dogecoin> [Accessed 10 February 2021].

NDTV Gadgets 360. 2021. Dogecoin: Musk Connection and Everything Else You Need to Know. [online] Available at: <https://gadgets.ndtv.com/internet/news/dogecoin-what-is-explain-elon-musk-current-price-market-value-how-to-buy-details-2365704> [Accessed 10 February 2021].

Npr.org. 2021. NPR Cookie Consent and Choices. [online] Available at: <https://www.npr.org/2021/02/09/965995556/who-let-the-doge-coin-out> [Accessed 10 February 2021].

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