Dogecoin is one of the most popular cryptocurrencies in the world. Initially, it was created as a joke but in a couple of months, the altcoin has gained a market cap of $60 million. The coin is easy to mine and has no limit of supply, so there are billions of Dogecoins circulating in the world. Nowadays, this altcoin is frequently used for tipping for interesting content on the Internet.
Early History
The coin was developed by the Portland programmer Billy Markus in 2013. An Adobe Systems employee Jackson Palmer was helping Markus to embody his vision of a fun cryptocurrency that would not be raising associations with the criminal reputation of the cryptocurrency world.
The developers created a website that utilizes the comic sans font and a Shiba Inu dog image — both elements of the popular Doge meme. The initial coin created by Markus was a lot like Luckycoin, a Litecoin-based cryptocurrency but later it came through some upgrades. All these coins use a Scrypt technology that made these coins easy to mine in the early years.
Dogecoin became available for the public in December 2013. Two weeks later the price experienced a 300% growth and declined again after a hack of the Dogecoin wallet that led to a theft of millions of Dogecoins (all the coins were compensated to the victims by the Dogecoin community through the donations one month later). Soon DOGE became listed on many exchanges (currently the coin is available on dozens of crypto exchanges including such giants as Kraken, Binance, OKEx, and Huobi). In 2014 Dogecoin community encouraged people to donate $50,000 in DOGE to Jamaican Bobsled Team so it could arrive in Sochi to participate in the Winter Olympic Games. The action turned out to be successful. Soon after Eric Nakagawa in collaboration with Charity: Water raised $30,000 in DOGE to fund building well in Kenya. The same year, the Dogecoin community has successfully raised $55,000 in DOGE needed to sponsor the NASCAR driver Josh Wise who participated in the number of races in the car with the Dogecoin and Reddit paraphernalia. In 2015 Jackson Palmer retired from the project however, the coin is still popular and in active use. After the departure of Palmer, the coin had no notable upgrades, neither it has a whitepaper nor a roadmap. Dogecoin turned out to be a success and made its way to the top 50 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.
Use Cases
There are several ways Dogecoin is used as a currency. On Reddit, Twitter, and Imgur, DOGE is used for tipping the creators of content. The money can be sent via the bot developed by the enthusiasts from the Dogecoin community. The charity events with DOGE involvement are not so frequent as they used to be in the early days. However, if it was possible in the past to raise Dogecoins worth of thousands of dollars, we believe that it can happen anytime again.
In the late 2010s, the Reddit Dogecoin community did a series of charity events for homeless raising funds in DOGE. There were such initiatives as DogePizzaForHomeless and SocksForHomeless that were successfully fulfilled.
As the community is the driver of the Dogecoin infrastructure, it's no wonder that these people, not the dev team, are responsible for creating tipping bots and other apps aimed at making the use of DOGE easier. One of the best examples is DogePal, a payment network for DOGE transactions where people can send each other DOGE coins using email addresses.
More than that, a number of merchants accept DOGE as a means of payment. This coin was used by individuals for buying diverse stuff: from the Internet domains to real estate. Despite being quite an average coin in terms of technology, the asset value preserves itself due to the efforts of its community. The power of people using this coin moves the price forward and keeps this asset in the light spot for years. At some point, Elon Musk referred to Dogecoin as his favorite cryptocurrency.
Dogecoin Features
The network is based on the Proof-of-Work consensus protocol which makes this coin minable. Dogecoin is an inflationary currency as it has no supply limit and new coins will be mined again and again increasing the total amount of circulating DOGE. Block time is 1 minute. The transactions in DOGE are quite cheap. The fee is around 1 cent. At the same time, the Dogecoin network is much faster than Bitcoin. It is capable of performing 30 transactions per second (the Bitcoin network is doing only around 7 transactions per second).
The consensus algorithm used by Dogecoin is different from the usual Proof-of-Work. It is called Auxiliary Proof of Work. Thanks to it, DOGE coins can be merged mined with Litecoin. It means that DOGE can be mined simultaneously with Litecoin without performing additional work. On one hand, this feature helps Dogecoin to avoid 51% attacks, on the other hand, it preserves the relevance of Dogecoin as many people are mining a popular currency Litecoin, making some DOGE as a bonus that can be used for this or those purposes. Since 2018, the block reward is 10 000 DOGE. This altcoin is supported by several multi-currency wallets including the popular platforms Atomic Wallet, Exodus, Freewallet, etc. Moreover, DOGE can be stored in a Dogechain wallet.
Price Analysis
The AltQuick exchange added a DOGE/USD trading pair in 2014. That was the beginning of the DOGE exchange trading history. Currently, DOGE is available on numerous cryptocurrency exchanges.
Throughout its history, Dogecoin had its own market trends which at times were different from the overall contemporary cryptocurrency market tendencies. Most of the spikes were triggered by community activity (fundraising events, flashmobs, and so on). Of course, the coin didn't exist in total independence from the rest of the market. DOGE reached its all-time high roughly at the same time as almost any cryptocurrency — on January 7, 2018 ($0.018773).
Obviously, the coin has a future. The developers did nothing to improve the coin in the last 5 years. Logically, this coin should have been abandoned by 2016 but it didn't happen. Its ability to survive and gain attention from time to time is coming from the power of DOGE's community and cryptocurrency whales doing price manipulation. We can predict where the Dogecoin's price is going to, but first, we should observe the way behind this coin in detail.
The earliest record of the Dogecoin price is December 15, 2013. The price was $0.000559. The price was quite volatile those days, drifting from $0.0001 to $0.0015 and back. By February of 2014, the price had increased and begun to grow and decrease in the interval of $0.0011-$0.0019. In March it dropped below $0.001 again. DOGE was around $0.0005 for the rest of the spring and moved closer towards $0.0003 by early June. In July it even dropped below $0.0003 at some point. One month later, it was already lower than $0.0002. For the rest of the year, DOGE was volatile. At average its price was around $0.00024. In the winter, the rate shrank to around $0.00015. By May of 2015, the price had dropped below $0.0001. In general, 2015 was not the best year for Dogecoin in terms of price. On May 7, the currency hit its all-time minimum at $0.000085. Bitcoin was quite stable and low that year (until November), too. However, despite the BTC price didn't have any spike around that time, in June Dogecoin had a short surge reaching $0.0002 for a while. That was one of the examples of how independent from the BTC trends the DOGE's price is.
By the end of the summer, the average price of Dogecoin was around $0.00013 and even declined a little more during the next months. The next positive news for Dogecoin investors came in late January 2016 when the price regained a $0.0002 support level. At some point, it even hit $0.0005 for a while but soon dropped to $0.00034 and then lower. Most of the time, the price was going back and forth around the $0.00023 mark until June. In the first summer month of 2016, the price reached $0.0003 and then kept around this level although mostly a little below this mark. During the summer, the average price was decreasing gradually and declined to around $0.00023 in August. By the end of the year, it was rather around $0.0002. The price was quite stable until the spring of 2017 when the cryptocurrency market had begun to warm up. This time, DOGE had followed the general trend and the price gradually began to rise. In March the coin was trading at $0.00023 - $0.0003. In April, the average price climbed to around $0.0004. The spring of 2017 was full of anomalies. For example, despite the fact that most of April Dogecoin was traded at $0.0004 several times the price peaked at $0.0006. In May, the price had crossed the $0.001 mark. By the end of the month, the price was already $0.003.
The summer of 2017 was the last quiet moment before the crypto storm of late 2017 that saw the entire cryptocurrency market all-time high. Dogecoin wasn't an exclusion. In June its price slowly decreased to below $0.003. In the middle of July, it was already around $0.0015. The price was going back and forth for the rest of the summer, but in September it headed down and fell to $0.0006 at the lowest point. In October and November, the price was slightly above $0.001. In December it started to boost quickly gaining the value from $0.0019 to $0.01 within one month. The historical maximum for DOGE was reached on January 7, 2018, at $0.018773. By the end of the winter, DOGE was already only $0.006, shrinking twice the next month. April saw a short surge, probably connected to the listing of Dogecoin on ZB.com. In 2018, the price was volatile going from $0.002 to $0.005 and back. Most of the time, it was closer to $0.002 extreme. 2019 wasn't better. In April of 2019, the price was as low as $0.002 even when the coin got listed on Huobi Global. In July, when the coin was added to the lists of Binance and OKEx, the price climbed to $0.003 (only to drop again a bit later).
2020 wasn't very bright. In March the Dogecoin price had dropped together with the prices of most cryptocurrencies after the traders' panic amid the financial cataclysm triggered by the oil price downfall and the COVID news. In July thanks to a TikTok challenge, DOGE managed to gain $0.005 for a while. For most of August, the price was close to $0.003. In September it went below. By late November the price saw a small rekindle reaching $0.0035 and even $0.004 in December. 2021 was a big year for Dogecoin. Thanks to the support of Elon Musk and the Dogecoin's jolly community the coin has entered the top20 list of crypto by market cap. As of February 2022, the price is above 15 cents.
Price Prediction
The events of 2020 have plaid out well for the crypto market. People and institutions have paid attention to the benefits of cryptocurrencies in conditions of financial turbulence. It had led to a crypto market spike and Dogecoin price saw rapid growth, too. As DOGE has a history of use cases, it's popular, and it is already capable of performing relatively quick transactions, it won't leave the market once and forever. The strength of the coin's community has proved that the DOGE price can keep on rising regardless of what happens with the rest of the market. More than that, as Dogecoin is sometimes considered by merchants, this coin will have a bigger exposure and growth.
By the end of 2022, the price can reach up to $0.24. The price will probably double up after the 2024 block reward halving of Bitcoin and reach $0.6 by the end of 2024. Experts believe that by 2031, Dogecoin's price may cross the $5 mark.