Doge Day is the annual celebration of the most famous meme coin of all: Dogecoin. Despite the recent cryptocurrency dips, the token that was launched ‘as a joke’ is still going strong. With the second Doge Day on April 20th, 2022, will people start taking this joke more seriously?
Dogecoin launched as a joke token on December 6th, 2013. Nearly a decade later, the famous meme coin with a Shiba Inu logo has its own day and a community of fans and followers.
A brief history of Dogecoin
Dogecoin was launched on December 6th, 2013 by Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer. The two men said they wanted to create something more accessible for users than Bitcoin.
Unlike the famous OG cryptocurrency, which has a capped circulation of 21 million coins, Dogecoin has no limit on supply. 10,000 Dogecoin are created with every new block, with a block time of one minute. Five billion Dogecoin enter circulation every year.
Almost immediately, the coin rose in value. On December 9th, 2013, Dogecoin went up by 300% and people were trading billions of them per day. We should all note that this was before there was widespread knowledge of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. People knew about Bitcoin by this point, but Ethereum launched 18 months after Dogecoin. These were very early days.
After some wild price fluctuations in the mid-10s, and no outstanding utilities to make widespread adoption worthwhile, Dogecoin began seriously pumping near the beginning of 2021. It went up over 800% in 24 hours because a famous billionaire tweeted about the coin (more on him later).
When it went past $0.5 on May 4th, 2021, Dogecoin’s price surged by 20,000%. On May 8th, 2021, the coin lost $35 billion in value in one day.
Mark Cuban, the owner of NBA team Dallas Mavericks NBA, was soon praising the coin’s ‘deterministic inflation’ mechanic and hailing the coin’s potential as a valid form of everyday currency. He announced that holders could use it to pay for team merchandise.
On May 9th 2021, a SpaceX rideshare mission was funded completely by Dogecoin, becoming the first journey to space funded by cryptocurrency. Inventor of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin joined the board and Premier League Watford has Dogecoin as its shirt sleeve sponsor.
And despite all this, the coin still kinda seems like a joke. Maybe it’s the name. Maybe it’s the dog symbol. Time will tell if Dogecoin will ever be more than a meme token but for now, we can enjoy the dog’s smiley face.
Why does a coin have a day?
Dogecoin evangelists started Doge Day in 2021. Much like the coin itself, this began partly as a joke and partly as an experiment to see how far a joke can go. It’s difficult to say who first thought up Doge Day.
Some reports suggest it was a man from Phoenix, Arizona, named Shaun Becker. Whoever it was, the internet soon took up the cause and the stated aim of Doge Day was to get the coin’s value to $1. Unfortunately for them, they never achieved their goal. Dogecoin reached a high of $0.73 on May 8th, 2021. It now sits at $0.14.
The Doge Day Effect
Doge Day 2021 may have had a significant impact on the price of the coin. In the week before April 20th, 2021, Dogecoin’s price went up by 470%, from $0.07 to $0.4.
At the same time, cryptocurrencies across the board were pumping. In the middle of such a fevered bull market, and a crypto bull market where surges and drops seemingly come from nowhere, it’s difficult to say exactly why a price spike happened.
We can say that there has been no similar increase this year. Over the past seven days, Dogecoin has gone up by a relatively modest 4.6%. Over the past two weeks, it’s down by 5.4%. Identifying short-term trends is relatively simple in the cryptocurrency market; finding reasons for them is far more complicated.
Copycat coins
After the phenomenal, entirely unsustainable success of Dogecoin, many copycat coins entered the market. Or should that be copydogs? Whatever we call these imitators, the most well-known of these is the infamous Shiba Inu coin.
Created in August 2020 by the unknown Ryoshi, this coin was named after the Shiba Inu dog depicted in Dogecoin’s token symbol. Bearing in mind that Dogecoin began as a joke project wihtout inherent value or utility, for another coin to come out with even less of both is faintly ridiculous.
Still, despite its drawbacks, the Shiba Inu has a current market cap of $13.8 billion and it’s maintained this level for much of 2022. And now, the Shiba Inu project has its own decentralized exchange: ShibaSwap. So it seems to be building some sort of legitimacy.
Floki Inu, a joke coin based on a joke coin based on a joke coin, has a market cap of $258 million. No one knows what it does and no one knows what it will do. But still, people trade it. It has a current daily trading volume of nearly $11 million. That’s a lot more than some coins and these ones have actual utility.
To prove just how much of a joke the Floki Inu coin is, it took its name from Floki, the dog of an eccentric billionaire who is almost solely responsible for the stratospheric rise of Dogecoin’s price.
Elon Musk – shitposting sage of our times
Without Musk, there would probably be no meme coin. The man has a Twitter following of 82.5 million people and is one of the rare humans who is instantly recognizable by one name only: Elon.
When he tweeted on December 20th, 2020, ‘One Word: Doge’, it was the beginning of a saga that defined the crypto-fevered times. The coin immediately rose by 20% and its trendline went up and down throughout the year depending on the Tesla CEO’s whim. Musk wasn’t so much as predicting the oncoming popularity of Dogecoin. He was creating it.
Much like the coin itself, we can’t take Musk too seriously. So when he tweets ‘Dogecoin is the people’s crypto,’ we should take it with a pinch of salt and remember that even the richest man in the world needs the occasional laugh.
