Nobody was supposed to take Dogecoin seriously. Back in 2013, a couple of guys created a new cryptocurrency inspired by the "doge" meme, which features a Shiba Inu dog making excited but ungrammatical declarations.
"The price doesn't even matter," Dogecoin cofounder Billy Markus told Motherboard in 2013. Everyone assumed that people would have some fun playing around with a pretend currency for a year or two and then move on. The currency's value peaked around $90 million in February 2014 and then began a years-long slump.
At the start of 2017, the value of all Dogecoins in circulation was around $20 million.
"New features aren't being implemented into dogecoin because there's no active development anymore," cofounder Jackson Palmer told Coindesk in March of last year. "Eventually, it will become outdated. And with that, the network will organically wind down."
But cryptocurrency investors didn't get the memo. As the cryptocurrency market in general exploded in the summer and fall of 2017, Dogecoin went along for the ride. Its value started rising, and by the end of 2017, the value of all Dogecoins in circulation was almost $1 billion.
Then on Saturday the value hit $2 billion. Since then, it has lost some ground and the value of Dogecoins in circulation is now around $1.7 billion.
Palmer, who hasn't been actively involved in the project since 2015, thinks this is all kind of crazy. "It says a lot about the state of the cryptocurrency space in general that a currency with a dog on it which hasn't released a software update in over 2 years has a $1B+ market cap," Palmer told Coindesk last week.
reader comments
128