Dogecoin (ticker DOGE) is a cryptocurrency that software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer launched on December 6, 2013, as a joke poking fun at speculation in digital currencies. It is widely considered the first “meme coin,” and its logo is Kabosu, the Shiba Inu dog from the “doge” internet meme. Despite its satirical origins, it built a large online community and reached a peak market value of more than US$85 billion in May 2021.
Technically, Dogecoin uses a proof-of-work system based on the scrypt algorithm, borrowed from Litecoin and Luckycoin, and targets a new block about every minute (versus 10 minutes for Bitcoin). Unlike Bitcoin, it has no hard supply cap: after its first 100 billion coins were mined by mid-2015, about 5 billion new DOGE enter circulation every year. Dogecoins are digital tokens, so physical coins like the one pictured are novelty items, not legal tender.
Source: Wikipedia: Dogecoin
Image: Dogecoin gold coin by Jean burin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.