How often in a day do you just sit idle scrolling on social media to just read memes ? I personally spend a lot of time in memes, it’s like a stress buster. Every now and then you have new things going viral. Remember the scrumpy kid, the disaster girl or Bad luck Brian ? 😂 There are so many to name and we surely love them all.

In 2013, a picture of a pet Shiba Inu ‘Kabosu’ with a grumpy face, uploaded by a Japanese Teacher went viral on Social Media. Memes with the perplexed expression of the dog started surfacing on the Internet. People started posting memes with the dog and something witty written in a comic sans font.

Jackson Palmer who was a product manager in Sydney, Australia went a step ahead with the meme. He wanted to make fun of the then on-going situation of the crypto-market scenario in 2013. He decided to create a meme cryptocurrency and mock the market. He started tweeting about his ideas and finally created the dogecoin.com domain. Billy Markus, a software developer who was also a crypto enthusiast, learnt about the meme crypto through Jackson’s tweets and offered him to join hands to create the software around Dogecoin.They successfully launched it on 6th December, 2013 with the coding based on Litecoin.

The Founders should be Billionaires now. Right ?

No, both the founders Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus quit in 2015 after a ‘Toxic Community’ grew online around the meme coin. Alex Green one of the memeber of the said Toxic Community created an exchange for Dogecoin called ‘Moolah’. He showcased himself as a huge doner and once gave away $15,000 mistakenly instead of $1500 to a NASCAR fundraiser. This convinced people to donate large amounts to help create the exchange. Later it was found out that Green bought $1.5 million of Bitcoin out of it.

During the period, Markus was even laid off and hence had to sell of all his Doge holdings in order to buy a Honda Civic. He has always been vocal in his interviews that he created the project as a hobby or a side income activity. Also that he made many people rich but unfortunately money didn’t come his way.

Elon-The DogeFather

The billionaire, philanthropist, businessesman, founder of Tesla and SpaceX, we all know him by the name Elon, but the Doge Community knows him by the name ‘The Dogefather’. Post Binance listed Doge in 2019, many celebrities and influencial people indirectly through their tweets started talking about Doge. Elon Musk and Snoop Dogg are two of the notable celebrities in this list. In the April-May 2021 bull run, Elon went Berserk with his tweets on Doge.He posted an image of doge on the moon, a doge meme showcasing doge superior to the global financial system, tweeted that he is the Dogefather and what not. Each time he tweeted something, the price of Doge jumped and jumped high!

This was not it, he announced on twitter that he would host the Saturday Night Live (SNL-A weekly show in the USA) and would talk about Doge. Since the announcement was made, the price of Doge started to soar. The community planned to get the price to as close as $1 during the event. More and More people started to take entries into Doge, those who had no idea about crypto also started talking about Doge. Posts like ‘Doge to the Moon’ went all around social media. Doge became the most famous crypto.It entered top 5 cryptocurrencies by market cap, and the price had jumped by almost 11000% since the beginning of 2021. Unfortunately on the Day of the Event, the price took a dip even before the show started. It turned out to be a perfect ‘Buy the Rumour, Sell the News’ kind of an outcome.

It’s interesting to note that there was also a Doge Millionaire in this period ‘Glauber Contessoto.’ He invested $180,000 in Doge when it’s price was $0.045 in February. In April through a youtube video and Dogecoin subreddit he announced that he was now a millionaire and disclosed his holdings. He credited his success to Elon Musk and said that he was inspired to invest in Doge by Elon’s tweets.

Post the SNL event, Elon kept his words of taking Doge to the moon and announced that SpaceX would launch a mission to the moon in 2022 and it will be funded using Dogecoin. He then later also took a poll asking followers if Tesla should accept doge as a mode of payment. With any surprise the majority of the poll went towards YES.

Quite recently on 24th October, 2021 he revealed that he supports Dogecoin because it’s the people’s crypto. The people who support doge are not financial experts nor high-techies from Sillicon valley and hence common people can relate to it.

Digging deep into details about Doge

• Total Supply- Unlimited

Unlike Bitcoin and other major Cryptos, which have a limited defined supply, Doge was created to be without any limit. There is no upper cap on the total supply. Dogecoin is inflationary by nature i.e as the supply increases, its value will go down. The main moto of the founders was to have a low price per unit.

• Current Supply- 131.9B

• Consensus Mechanism-Proof of Work(POW)

Like all early cryptos, Doge also uses POW i.e having the miners solve complex mathematical puzzles through high level computational energy. Almost 10,000 new coins are mined every minute.

• All Time High- $ 0.7673

It touched its all time high in May during the SNL Frenzy.

Is Doge still good enough ?

We learnt about how doge became the People’s Favourite through its gains and social media influence.But after the SNL Frenzy, it has been a roller coaster journey for doge. We have not seen that kind of momentum in the price since then. The positive side as pointed out by Mark Cuban, another American Billionaire Entrepreneur, is that Doge can be a good mode of payment as compared to the other giant cryptocurrencies. This is because the price per unit of Doge is lower and will be mathematically easy for general public to calculate while making a payment. With Ethereum CEO Vitalik and Elon’s close aide Jared Birchall in the Doge Committee, we can expect some positive decisions to be taken in the near future. AMC theatres, Tesla and other Corporates have already started considering Doge for mode of payments. Even if any one makes an announcement, that will be a big bullish news for Doge. This is what makes Doge different from the other meme coins as it has the support of Big Influential people and even after a lower than average performance post May, it is still in the top 10 Cryptocurrencies by market cap.

You can consider Doge in your portfolio but do not invest more than 2-5% of your portfolio in meme coins. You can opt for CoinDCX to invest in Doge.

The information provided is for Educational Purpose and is in no way a financial advice.