How Did Dogecoin Come Into Exist

New York (CNN Business) -- Dogecoin is the hottest and quirkiest cryptocurrency on the planet. The total value of dogecoins in circulation now exceeds $50 billion - not bad for a digital currency that started out as a joke.

In 2017 and early 2018, during the cryptocurrency bubble, Dogecoin briefly peaked at $0.017 per coin on January 7, 2018, reaching a total market capitalization of $2 billion. Demand for the currency soared so much in April that it broke Robinson's cryptocurrency trading system. The price of the currency doubled again on Friday after Elon Musk tweeted it for the umpteenth time (more on that shortly).

In July 2020, the price of dogecoin skyrocketed following a TikTok trend aimed at coins under one dollar. Its market capitalization now stands at more than $9.2 billion and has risen more than 26,000 percent in the six months since. On Friday afternoon, it hit a new all-time high. DOGEcoin, the cryptocurrency branded with the viral dog meme earlier this year, hit new all-time highs on Friday morning.

Virtual currencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum have soared in value this week, as has Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that began as an internet parody in 2013. Based on the "Doge" meme, which began as a fun alternative to Bitcoin, the value of dogecoins rose this week - for $1.99 billion to $3.4 billion in the last 24 hours according to Coingecko, a market data site. If the proponents of cryptocurrency believe you, here is everything you need to know about the cryptocurrency.

Dogecoin, developed by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer in December 2013, is a copy of Bitcoin and Litecoin, but resembles Bitcoin and features a Shiba Inu dog referred to in a silly language with canine and moon-related metaphors. Fans of Dogecoin or Doge Currency, which started as a joke but now is one of the most popular coins ever, buy it as Hodl because it is a cryptocurrency to say: "I don't sell anything, something big happens.".

The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has expressed on numerous occasions on Twitter his admiration for Dogecoin, and his tweets have driven the price of Dogecoin to new heights - at a point, the price overtook the 100 percent increase following his tweet.

Despite its unusual origins, Dogecoin has exploded in popularity, becoming the third largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization in 2021 (as of this article). Although it is technically a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin and Ethereum, it is very different from the more popular coins. Instead, it was created, at least in part, as a light-hearted joke among crypto-enthusiasts who derived their name from a popular meme.

Dogecoin was founded by IBM software engineer Billy Markus in Portland, Oregon and Adobe software engineer Jackson Palmer who set out to create a peer-to-peer digital currency that would reach a broader demographic than Bitcoin. Dogecoin shows as logo and namesake the face of a Shiba-Inu dog, the Doge-Meme.

Markus developed the Dogecoin protocol on the basis of existing cryptocurrencies such as Luckycoin and Litecoin 1.0, which use Scrypt technology for their proof-of-work algorithms. When DogeCoin was founded in 2013, the two software developers joked about other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. They placed Shiba-Inus faces on the coin to fuse the two popular trends of the time.

In addition to the bitcoin cap of 21 million coins there is no limit on the number of dogecoins created. Software developers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, after the popular Doge (Shiba Inu) meme, named the satirical cryptocurrency Dogecoin (pronounced doje) a coin with a soft G-tone.

Earlier this year, Elon Musk tweeted a "Lion King" meme in which he holds a dogecoin and a dog - apparently it's Simba's dog. Musk tweeted an oblique reference to the cryptocurrency, sending it to a new record high. Since then it has stolen the limelight from the world's largest and second biggest cryptocurrency, Bitcoin (BTC: USD) and Ethereum (ETH: USD), and rose this week by more than 200% in 24 hours to raise a market capitalization of $5.2 billion (PSD: 3.76 billion ).

But the cryptocurrency is not as popular as it used to be - in fact, it was launched in 2013 as a joke by Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus. Dogecoin takes its name from the logo of the Shiba Inu Dog from Dogememe, which became popular on the Internet in the same year. In 2013, inspired by the famous dog meme and the early rise of nascent bitcoin, Adobe software engineer Jackson Palmer proposed the idea of a "dogecoin" as satire. Palmer and Markus created the cryptocurrency to satirise the growth of old coins and turn the meme into a cryptocurrency.

The idea of Dogecoin was put into practice when Adobe Software engineer Jackson Palmer worked together with IBM Software Engineer Billy Markus to integrate Dogecoin Code Base into existing Litecoin cryptocurrency. DogeCoin is an open-source cryptocurrency founded by Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus in 2013.

Key Takeaways Dogecoin began as a joke based on a popular meme of a Shiba Inu, a Japanese breed of dog. DogeCoin, a cryptocurrency that derives its name and logo from the "shiba inu" meme that has been popular for several years, has no cap.

Introduced in 2013, there are currently over 100 billion dogecoins, with up to five billion new coins being minted each year. There is no lifetime limit to the number of dogecoins that can exist, and with millions of new dogecoins coming on the market every day, there is little incentive to stick with the cryptocurrency long term. Bitcoin continues to grow in value because the system does not have a lifetime cap on the number of coins that can be produced.

Every four years, the amount of bitcoin put into circulation as a mining reward halves, and the rate of Bitcoin inflation halves with the release of coins. Dogecoin is an inflationary coin unlike cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, which have a deflationary cap on the number of coins produced. The coin value of Dogecoins is currently less than $0.003 per coin, and people are likely to give it away for most of 2020.

The first sign that all was not well in the dogecoin community was Jackson Palmer who said that a toxic community had grown around the coin and the money it produced. The value of dogecoins shot up during the bubble along with the rest of the cryptover, peaking at the end of 2017, but falling back to pre-bubble levels in 2018.