Lets Talk: DOGE

Now that the storm around DOGE has settled down, it has left some of us like WHAT JUST HAPPENED! If you were clueless about why, how and what was the cause of this madness.

Dogecoin was constructed in 2013 as a joke to mock the number of cryptocurrencies that were coming up at the time. Jackson Palmer who was a crypto enthusiast noticed the number of altcoins that were coming up. So, one night after work JP sat with a beer and bought Dogecoin.com and photoshopped the iconic Shiba Inu on the coin and put it on the website. After which when Billy Markus approached JP with the idea of actually making it a digital currency and that’s how Dogecoin was born.

Basically, it’s a meme coin.. but a valid question over here might be that aren’t there more meme coins in the market, what is so special about this one?

A short no brainer to this is that the cultural prevalence of Doge as an Internet meme helped drive its value. In addition to that, think of the coin as something that became viral and the virality has no reason behind it.

On the other hand, if you want a detailed breakdown on how it became this popular here it is(remember the coin was created 8 years ago)-.

• The coin started gaining popularity in 2018 when Robinhood announced its crypto trading platform and allowed the exchange of dogecoin.
• In 2020 started the Dogecoin challenge on TikTok which made it extremely popular among the 8 million TikTok users at that time.
• This tweet: was enough to help surge the coin to about 25%.

link to the Tweet

• In January 2021 doge went up by 6X times because of Reddit; a crypto-themed subreddit SatoshiStreetBets. This made the coin come under the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.
• Musk tweeted this-

link for the Tweet

• 20th April 2021 -Doge day — Dogecoin was trading around 30 cents. In the early morning hours of April 20, it had a value of over 40 cents (Rs.28). This was seen as a peak and investors sold their coins, causing Dogecoin to drop down before the big buy leading up. I know you are thinking that that was not a good day for doge so how did it help; as they say, any publicity is good publicity.
• After this, we saw a lot of businesses say that they will start accepting DOGE as payment.
• The masterstroke that leads to doge reaching its peak at Rs52-

1. Gemini and eToro announced trading of DOGE
2. Oakland A, a pro baseball team, had announced it was selling two-seat pods for 100 DOGE for its series with the Toronto Blue Jays.
3. BitPay, which was the world’s leading provider of cryptocurrency payments allowed Dogecoin payments to businesses and consumers.
4. MAVS announced that they will be accepting DOGE for tickets and merch.
5. Elon Musk’s SNL skit.

That’s it! This was the peak and since then the value has been going down.

After reading all of this a few questions might come to your mind.

So is dogecoin dead now or will we see more of it?

Why did people choose to hype up a meme coin when there are so many digital currencies out there?

Doge for now has no immediate plan for development which will cause the coin to become stagnant in the future. The circulating supply of the coin is huge which will prevent a rise in the price in future.

However, it has some hardcore fan following and they are in no mood to let the currency die. In fact in theory it does have a chance. DOGE could have leverage over BTC as it has a higher supply, lower price and faster transaction, which is considered kind of ideal for daily payment, and it has a community culture that can make it resonate with the general public.

This Mark Cuban tweet is a very good explanation of what would make dogecoin a permanent currency-

link to the Tweet

The reason why a meme coin reached this height of popularity was as it was not as intimidating as the other coins in the market. Cryptocurrencies can seem to be scary and in fact, all of them do take themselves very seriously. Every currency has a ‘well thought out model’ behind it and all of them claim to be the future of crypto. So when people saw a coin that was not meant to be taken seriously they wanted to be a part of it and join in the fun. This enabled DOGE to get cult-like popularity.

Even when it caught in the hype, the Dogecoin community tried to keep things not so serious and put the money raised from it to the best use (in the spirit of Doge)like funding the Jamaican Bobsled Team for the 2014 winter Olympics, building a well in the Tana river basin in Kenya in cooperation with Charity: Water and many such interesting projects.

Maybe all of this is a bit too much to digest, but I hope it has given you a clear picture of what this entire thing was about.