Dogenomics: What's So Special About Dogecoin Anyway?

The interest in Dogecoin is skyrocketing — in fact, it briefly overtook Bitcoin (BTC) in terms of sparking Twitter interest, becoming the first cryptocurrency to do so, as per The TIE.

The cryptocurrency surged to an all-time high of $0.0791 on Friday from trading at $0.0077 a day ago, thanks to calls for pumping from r/SatoshiStreetBets and a signature subtle tweet from Tesla Inc. TSLA CEO Elon Musk.

What Makes Doge A Prime Candidate? Dogecoin is a veteran meme cryptocurrency invented in 2013 by International Business Machines Corporation IBM engineer Billy Markus and Adobe Inc. ADBE engineer Jackson Palmer.

The founders have since moved on and are in fact disenchanted with the project. Markus said on Twitter Saturday that he was being "harassed" by Dogecoin investors again with the latest surge despite having left the project seven years ago over similar concerns.

A joke cryptocurrency featuring the famed Shiba Inu that trades at a low price point and is primarily driven by the community, rather than a company or a team, is likely why Dogecoin is seeing more interest from the Redditors over other digital assets.

Where Does Dogecoin Come From? Dogecoin is an indirect fork of Bitcoin.

The cryptocurrency was created as a fork of now-obsolete Luckycoin, which was itself a fork of Litecoin, which was forked out of Bitcoin.

Explaining the decision to fork out of Luckycoin, Palmer explained in 2019 that the founders wanted to make the project as “undesirable” as possible.

Luckycoin had random block rewards built into its blockchain and that would disincentivize miners from creating more of the cryptocurrency, Palmer said at the time.

See Also: How to Buy Dogecoin (DOGE)

What About Its Supply? When Dogecoin initially launched, Palmer said the supply would be infinite – no surprise since the founders wanted it to be “undesirable.”

In 2014, however, the co-founder said the cryptocurrency would be capped at 100 billion supply and 5 billion new coins could be created each year.

As of press time, there are about 128.18 billion dogecoins in circulation supply, as per CoinMarketCap data. Just one cryptocurrency, BitTorrent (BTT), has a higher circulation supply at about 990 billion.

For context, Bitcoin has a circulating supply of 18.6 million coins, and only 21 million coins of the world’s apex cryptocurrency can ever be minted, as per the rules embedded in its blockchain.

The constrained supply is supposed to help with keeping the price of Bitcoin up with an anticipated rise in demand. Palmer and Markus were not concerned with keeping the price of Dogecoin up and didn’t pay heed to supply constraints.

How Has Dogecoin Traded Historically? Dogecoin began trading in late 2013 at around $0.0003.

The joke would soon pick up and Dogecoin price tripled by February 2014, tripling at $0.0015, and outperforming Bitcoin.

Dogecoin has seen momentary surges since, mostly as part of coordinated efforts to pump. It traded above $0.013 in early 2018 when altcoins were surging with a pause in the Bitcoin rally after it crossed the $20,000 mark.

Image: Dogecoin All-Time Performance Relative To Bitcoin, Courtesy Of CoinMarketCap

The cryptocurrency has traded mostly muted since 2019, with Musk or adult film stars or TikTokers or "Tiger King" cast driving occasional surges.

The latest surge is unprecedented in Dogecoin history, but with other cryptocurrencies already hounding the pumping interest on social media, the parody cryptocurrency has retreated significantly back to $0.0375 at press time late Sunday from the all-time high hit on Friday.