What is dogecoin? Understanding the joke?

The cryptocurrency market is perhaps one of the most volatile and unusual investment opportunities in existence today. From the original Bitcoin came hundreds of other cryptocurrencies of all types and for all different purposes. Of these, the most well-known are probably still Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ethereum.

However, there is another cryptocurrency that has spent a great deal of time in the news lately, which you might be wondering about: Dogecoin. Originally created in 2013 as a joke based on a popular internet meme, Dogecoin is the latest cryptocurrency in the news. Here is a look at what has fueled the strong interest in Dogecoin and what’s driving the latest surge.

What Is Dogecoin?

Dogecoin came onto the cryptocurrency scene as a joke—literally. It was meant as a sort of satirical homage to Bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency that surged onto the market in 2008. Dogecoin began as a joke tweet from Jackson Palmer, then an employee of software company Adobe. He purchased the domain dogecoin.com and created a website with the meme image. IBM software engineer Billy Markus saw the site and reached out to Palmer, and together they co-created the cryptocurrency.

In many ways, Dogecoin is similar to Bitcoin. Like Bitcoin, Dogecoin is a form of cryptocurrency—a digital asset that functions as a unit of exchange and allows people to conduct peer-to-peer transactions without a central banking authority.

Dogecoin differs most drastically from Bitcoin in that it does not have a hard limit on the total supply of Dogecoin available. Bitcoin is limited to about 21 million coins, though not all of these have been mined yet. By comparison, Dogecoin currently has more than 100 billion coins outstanding, and even more hit the supply each year.

The Dogecoin mascot, the shiba inu, originally became popular as a 2013 internet meme that included a picture of the Japanese dog with a quizzical look on its face, accompanied by colorful text intended to display the dog’s internal monologue in broken English. Originally, the meme borrowed its “doge” name from an Internet cartoon series popular in the early 2000s; in one episode, the misspelling “doge” was used to refer to a dog.

But why now? What happened?

The answer lies with well-known entrepreneur Elon Musk. He has been credited with sparking this latest round of speculation through a series of tweets about Dogecoin. Several of his past tweets have caused spikes in Dogecoin and Bitcoin, though he has often been quoted as saying the tweets are just jokes.

Rocker Gene Simmons and rapper Snoop Dogg also helped fuel Dogecoin’s recent surge, with Snoop Dogg tweeting a mock album image captioned “Snoop Doge” and Simmons calling himself the “God of Doge.”

Dogecoin’s surge is also likely due to activity on TikTok and Reddit, and further demand for cryptocurrency fueled by Bitcoin’s recent surge. Investors on Reddit and elsewhere have openly said they are trying to push Dogecoin’s value to $1 and have called on others to hold their coins until it reaches this peak—just for kicks, it seems.

All this activity has pushed the market valuation of Dogecoin above $10 billion, making it the tenth most valuable cryptocurrency currently in circulation.