Propose an edit: Dogecoin

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Title Category One sentence summary Infobox, one "key: value" per line Article body, markdown, use [[wiki links]] and end with a ## References section

## Origin

Dogecoin launched on December 6, 2013, created by Billy Markus, then a software engineer at IBM, and Jackson Palmer, a product manager at Adobe. Both felt cryptocurrency was taking itself far too seriously, so they attached a currency to the Doge meme: a 2010 photograph of Kabosu, a Shiba Inu adopted by Japanese teacher Atsuko Sato, captioned in multicolored Comic Sans. The joke worked immediately. Within two weeks Dogecoin was processing more transactions per day than Bitcoin, and dogecoin.com drew more than a million visitors in its first month. Every [[meme coin]] traded in [[the trenches]] descends from this template: a coin whose only fundamental is a shared joke.

## Early community era

The early community was defined by absurdist generosity rather than trading. Doge holders raised roughly 30,000 dollars to send the Jamaican bobsled team to the 2014 Sochi Olympics, funded clean water wells in Kenya through the Doge4Water campaign, and sponsored NASCAR driver Josh Wise's Doge branded car. Markus and Palmer stepped away by 2015, handing the chain to a volunteer core team; Palmer became a vocal critic of the industry while Markus, posting as Shibetoshi Nakamoto, remains a wry commentator on [[crypto twitter]].

## The Musk era

Dogecoin's second life began in 2021 when Elon Musk adopted it as a running bit, tweeting Doge memes to hundreds of millions of followers. The coin ran to an all time high around 0.73 dollars in May 2021 ahead of Musk's Saturday Night Live appearance, then sold off in a pattern later traders would recognize as the canonical sell the news top. The episode established that a meme plus a celebrity amplifier could outperform nearly every technology asset on earth, the thesis that the Solana trenches would industrialize.

## Legacy in the trenches

Dogecoin is the ancestor coin. Its Shiba Inu became the phenotype for a decade of descendants, from Shiba Inu on Ethereum to [[bonk]] and [[dogwifhat]] on Solana, and its history supplied the vocabulary of the culture, including going to the [[moon]]. Where Dogecoin took years to cycle from joke to mania, [[pump.fun]] compressed the arc to hours. In 2026 it remains among the largest cryptocurrencies and the largest meme coin by market capitalization, the permanent proof of concept the trenches are built on.

## References

- https://dogecoin.com/dogepedia/articles/history-of-dogecoin/
- https://99bitcoins.com/people/who-is-shibetoshi-nakamoto/
- https://www.bitnovo.com/blog/en/billy-markus-and-jackson-palmer-founders-of-doge
- https://www.gate.com/crypto-wiki/article/who-created-dogecoin-the-story-behind-the-doge-crypto-20260121

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