How much is Dogecoin worth today?

Started as a joke in 2013

Dogecoin began in December 2013 as a lighthearted take on the cryptocurrency boom. Billy Markus, a software engineer, and Jackson Palmer, who worked in marketing, created it and borrowed the Shiba Inu dog from the popular “doge” meme for its logo.

The joke stuck. A friendly online community grew up around the coin, using it for tips and small donations. In 2014 Dogecoin fans raised money to help send the Jamaican bobsleigh team to the Winter Olympics in Sochi. The coin has since become one of the best-known cryptocurrencies anywhere.

What dogecoin is used for

Dogecoin works much like early Bitcoin: it is a plain currency for sending value from one wallet to another, with no app platform on top. Blocks arrive about once a minute, so payments confirm sooner than on Bitcoin, and fees are generally low.

Its technical roots run through Litecoin, and it uses the same mining algorithm, Scrypt. Since 2014 the two networks have been merge-mined. Miners can secure both chains at once with the same work, which adds to Dogecoin’s security without any extra electricity.

No cap: 10,000 new coins every block

Bitcoin stops at 21 million. Dogecoin never stops. Since 2014 every new block has paid miners a fixed 10,000 DOGE, which adds up to roughly five billion new coins a year. Early on, the plan was a ceiling of 100 billion coins, but that limit was dropped in 2014. The total in circulation today is 156.36B DOGE.

Because the yearly addition is a set number of coins rather than a percentage, it becomes a smaller share of the whole each year. Supply keeps rising, just at a gently slowing rate in relative terms.

Why one DOGE costs so little

With more than a hundred billion coins out there and five billion more every year, the price of one dogecoin was always going to be modest. A cheap unit is not the same as a small network, though. To weigh Dogecoin against other coins, multiply its price by its circulating supply to get market cap, then compare those totals on our live coins page.

The same logic works the other way round for Bitcoin: one bitcoin is expensive, but it splits into 100 million satoshis, each worth a tiny amount.