If you use the internet on a regular basis, you’ve probably come across something related to crypto.
Even though cryptocurrencies are a rather modern trend, they have been around for years.
Most people who have general crypto knowledge know that crypto’s been around for a while. For example, Bitcoin has been around since 2013. But did you know that Dogecoin was also created in the same year? Why did they suddenly start booming more than ever this year?
Dogecoin started off as a joke between two former veteran Adobe software engineers, known as Jackson Palmer, and Billy Markus, who had built the dogecoin project through inspiration from what in their opinion was a combination of the two biggest trends of 2013, which were Bitcoin and the famous image of a japanese breed Shiba Inu dog that is known amongst the world as the Doge meme.
Palmer and Markus had created a copy of Bitcoin’s source code with a few tweaks, creating 100 billion dogecoins, making them easier to mine than bitcoin, while changing the ‘mining’ term to ‘dig’ since dogs do not mine.
Dogecoin immediately was successful and its price rose by 300% within the first week, thanks to reddit and its cult following. Currently the coin cost only 0.00026 USD.
The funny part is that the duo who created the currency didn’t even bother to mine any doge for themselves and only held a few thousand dollars in shares, since it was such a joke to them.
Along the years, Palmer and Markus donated all their dogecoin to charities and sponsorship clients, such as Olympic teams and even NASCAR drivers who at the time encountered financial difficulties.
While Palmer and Markus still kept seeing Doge as a joke, others thought otherwise and invested heavily in the coin, making it grow more and more.
Pushed by influencers
Markus and Palmer both ended up ditching the whole idea of the coin, for various reasons, such as not wanting to lead a ‘cult’, and more. It turned out that Dogecoin had become something a lot more serious than they wanted nor expected it to become.
Dogecoin kept being pushed by numerous influencers on social media, such as Carol Baskin, Gene Simmons, Mia Khalifa, Snoop Dogg, and the most important one of them all, Elon Musk, who often tweeted about dogecoin and always managed to significantly influence the price, whether he wanted it to rise or to go down.
Eventually, by May 2021, the price of a Dogecoin had risen to an all-time high of 0.73157800 USD, and the crypto community expects it to keep growing till it reaches the mythical $1 dollar mark.
The change in value over dogecoin wasn’t the biggest crypto-phenomena we have been affected by amongst the years, but those currencies that enable us to access and trade dogecoin itself, A.K.A. coinbase, or Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, and Binance, which have risen amongst the years and proven themselves to be an enabler of what we call the crypto frenzy nowadays.
