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Dogecoin

From memecoin.wiki, the free memecoin encyclopedia
Dogecoin
Dogecoin
Image: token logo via CoinGecko / DexScreener listings
tickerDOGE
chainOwn chain, merge mined with Litecoin
launchedDecember 6, 2013
creatorsBilly Markus, Jackson Palmer
websitedogecoin.com

Dogecoin is the 2013 joke cryptocurrency by Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer that became the ancestor of the entire meme coin category.

Contents
  1. 1 Origin
  2. 2 The 2013 Dogewallet hack
  3. 3 Early community era
  4. 4 The Kabosu NFT
  5. 5 The Musk era
  6. 6 Kabosu's death
  7. 7 Legal battles
  8. 8 DOGE the department
  9. 9 The ETF era
  10. 10 Current status
  11. 11 Legacy in the trenches
  12. 12 References

Origin

Dogecoin launched on December 6, 2013, created by Billy Markus, then a software engineer at IBM, and Jackson Palmer, a product manager at Adobe. Both felt cryptocurrency was taking itself far too seriously, so they attached a currency to the Doge meme: a 2010 photograph of Kabosu, a Shiba Inu adopted by Japanese teacher Atsuko Sato, captioned in multicolored Comic Sans. The joke worked immediately. Within two weeks Dogecoin was processing more transactions per day than Bitcoin, and dogecoin.com drew more than a million visitors in its first month. Every meme coin traded in the trenches descends from this template: a coin whose only fundamental is a shared joke.

The 2013 Dogewallet hack

The community's first crisis came fast. On December 25, 2013, hackers breached the Dogewallet service and stole about 21 million DOGE, then worth about 12,000 dollars, in the coin's first major theft. The community answered with the "SaveDogemas" donation drive, and within about a month donations had covered everything that was stolen, an early demonstration of the collective generosity that would define the coin's culture.

Early community era

The early community was defined by absurdist generosity rather than trading. The Jamaican bobsled fundraiser began January 19, 2014, and collected about 36,000 dollars worth of DOGE within two days to send the team to the 2014 Sochi Olympics; the DOGE to bitcoin exchange rate rose about 50 percent on the news. Doge4Water raised over 30,000 dollars from more than 4,000 donors for water wells in Kenya's Tana River basin in 2014, including one anonymous donation of 14 million DOGE, about 11,000 dollars at the time, an early whale legend. The NASCAR story has two acts: in March 2014 Reddit raised 67.8 million DOGE, about 55,000 dollars, to put the Doge livery on Josh Wise's No. 98 Ford at Talladega in May 2014, and the same communities then stuffed the ballot to vote Wise into the 2014 Sprint All Star Race, beating Danica Patrick in one of the biggest fan vote upsets in the event's history. Markus and Palmer stepped away by 2015, handing the chain to a volunteer core team; Palmer became a vocal critic of the industry while Markus, posting as Shibetoshi Nakamoto, remains a wry commentator on crypto twitter.

The Kabosu NFT

In June 2021 Atsuko Sato minted the original 2010 Kabosu photo as an NFT and sold it to PleasrDAO for 1,696.9 ETH. On September 2, 2021 PleasrDAO fractionalized it into 16,969,696,969 DOG tokens, and the implied valuation of the image peaked around 336 million dollars that month, turning the source photograph itself into a speculative asset alongside the coin it inspired.

The Musk era

Dogecoin's second life began in 2021 when Elon Musk adopted it as a running bit, tweeting Doge memes to hundreds of millions of followers. Market capitalization crossed 85 billion dollars around May 5, 2021, and CoinGecko records the all time high near 0.73 dollars on May 7, 2021. During Musk's Saturday Night Live appearance on May 8 the price fell nearly 30 percent to about 0.49 dollars as he called Dogecoin "a hustle" on Weekend Update, a sell off in a pattern later traders would recognize as the canonical sell the news top. The episode established that a meme plus a celebrity amplifier could outperform nearly every technology asset on earth, the thesis that the Solana trenches would industrialize.

Musk kept returning to the bit. On April 3, 2023 he replaced Twitter's bird logo with the Doge, and DOGE jumped more than 30 percent, from about 0.077 dollars to about 0.1046 dollars; it gave the gain back when the bird returned about three days later. A physical dogecoin launched toward the Moon on Astrobotic's Peregrine lander on January 8, 2024, but a propellant leak doomed the mission and the spacecraft burned up in Earth's atmosphere; the separate DOGE-1 satellite, announced in May 2021 as the first space mission paid for in DOGE, was delayed for years.

Kabosu's death

Kabosu died on May 24, 2024 at age 18. More than 250 fans attended a May 26 memorial in Narita, and her hometown of Sakura, Chiba had already unveiled a crowdfunded bronze statue of her on her sofa in November 2023.

A 258 billion dollar investor lawsuit accusing Musk and Tesla of running Dogecoin as a pyramid scheme, filed in June 2022, was dismissed with prejudice in August 2024 by Judge Alvin Hellerstein, who called Musk's statements "aspirational puffery"; plaintiffs dropped their appeal in November 2024.

DOGE the department

The third Musk era came in November 2024: DOGE more than doubled after the election to about 0.43 dollars by November 12, then Trump's announcement that day of the Musk led Department of Government Efficiency, also abbreviated DOGE, pushed the price above 0.47 dollars and market capitalization past 56 billion dollars, an unusual case of a government initiative's name directly repricing a meme coin.

The ETF era

Dogecoin entered the ETF era in 2025 and 2026: the REX Osprey DOJE fund launched September 18, 2025 on Cboe BZX under the Investment Company Act of 1940 as the first US dogecoin ETF, Grayscale's GDOG followed on NYSE Arca on November 24, 2025 with a debut Cointelegraph described as below volume expectations, Bitwise's BWOW launched November 26, 2025, and the 21Shares TDOG fund launched on Nasdaq on January 22, 2026 as the first with direct SEC approval.

Current status

As of August 19, 2026, DOGE trades around 0.070 dollars, about 90 percent below the 2021 high, with a market capitalization near 10.9 billion dollars, rank 10 by market cap, on a circulating supply of about 155.6 billion coins.

Legacy in the trenches

Dogecoin is the ancestor coin. Its Shiba Inu became the phenotype for a decade of descendants, from Shiba Inu on Ethereum to bonk and dogwifhat on Solana, and its history supplied the vocabulary of the culture, including going to the moon. Where Dogecoin took years to cycle from joke to mania, pump.fun compressed the arc to hours. In 2026 it remains among the largest cryptocurrencies and the largest meme coin by market capitalization, the permanent proof of concept the trenches are built on.

References

See also
  • dogwifhat dogwifhat is a Solana meme coin based on a photo of a Shiba Inu wearing a knitted hat, and
  • Doland Tremp Doland Tremp (TREMP) is a Solana parody coin of Donald Trump launched in February 2024, th
  • Dolos the Bully Dolos the Bully is a Solana AI agent token fronted by an autonomous insult comic persona n
  • Doom Doom is a Solana meme coin launched August 3, 2026 when original DOOM designer Sandy Peter
  • DUKO DUKO is a hand drawn dog meme coin launched on Solana in February 2024, marketed as Solana
Category: Coins
Last updated 2026-08-19