Dogecoin (DOGE) – which features the image of a Shiba Inu dog breed as a mascot – is a “meme coin” originally created as a satire around the early Bitcoin hype, but has since gained popularity and adoption in the crypto assets community.
What is the DOGE token?
As one of the first and more popular altcoins, DOGE can be bought and sold on many crypto exchanges, transferred peer-to-peer or mined through the Dogecoin network, and can be used to pay for physical and virtual goods.
DOGE is also widely used as a tip to reward creators and sharers of original content as well as contributors to specific online communities.
Team background
Billy Markus – an IBM software engineer in Oregon – reached out to Australia-based Adobe Product Marketing Manager Jackson Palmer who had bought the domain dogecoin.com.
They released Dogecoin in December 2013 as a “fun” currency that will appeal to audiences beyond Bitcoin’s supporters.
Palmer left the cryptocurrency space in June 2014 and is now working as Adobe’s Senior Director of Product Management, Growth, and Data Science.
Meanwhile, Markus has remained as an advisor to the Dogecoin Foundation along with Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin and Jared Birchall (Elon Musk’s representative).
The Dogecoin Foundation, a non-profit which aims to “develop a currency for the people” and “do only good every day” is currently managed by Dogecoin core developers and community veterans.
How does Dogecoin work?
Dogecoin’s blockchain is a fork of LuckyCoin, which is a now-defunct fork of Litecoin, which is a fork of Bitcoin’s blockchain. Got all that?
Don’t worry, all you need to know is that Dogecoin adopted Litecoin’s Scrypt algorithm as a way for miners to provide proof-of-work consensus to create blocks and verify transactions.
Thanks to Scrypt and a couple of tweaks, Dogecoin’s blockchain adds blocks (read: approves transactions) every 1 minute against Litecoin’s 2.5 minutes and Bitcoin’s 10 minutes.
With each new block, 10,000 DOGE is created every minute.
Token Metrics:
- 4.4M DOGE addresses created
- 132.67B DOGE currently in circulation
- Annual Inflation Rate: 3.82%
- Max supply: DOGE initially had a max supply of 100 billion when it was created in 2013, but that cap was removed in February 2014.