In its early days, a community of enthusiasts arranged publicity stunts to raise Dogecoin’s profile, gathering funds to send the Jamaican Bobsleigh team to the 2014 Olympics, for instance, or sponsoring a NASCAR driver. “Doge was really started to poke fun at Bitcoin,” said Pat White, CEO of Bitwave. Palmer branded the cryptocurrency’s logo using a meme popular at the time that featured the deliberately misspelled word “doge” to describe a Shiba Inu dog. Software engineers Billy Marcus and Jackson Palmer created Dogecoin in late 2013. Despite this unusual origin story, it has exploded in popularity in 2021-as of writing, Dogecoin has become the fifth largest cryptocurrency by market cap. Dogecoin was originally created at least in part as a lighthearted joke for crypto enthusiasts, and took its name from a once-popular meme. Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin or Ethereum-although it’s a very different animal than either of these popular coins.
