Dogecoin launched in December 2013, created by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer as a light-hearted parody of the speculative altcoin boom at the time, based on the 'Doge' Shiba Inu meme. It is a proof-of-work fork of Litecoin's codebase (itself a Bitcoin fork), and despite its origins as a joke has become one of the most liquid and widely held coins, helped by periodic high-profile social-media attention.
Category
meme
Consensus mechanism
Proof of Work (merge-mined with Litecoin)
Launched
2013
Technical design: a Litecoin fork with uncapped supply
Dogecoin inherits Litecoin's Scrypt proof-of-work mining and fast block times, and since 2014 has been merge-mined with Litecoin — meaning Litecoin miners can secure the Dogecoin chain simultaneously with negligible extra cost, which has materially strengthened Dogecoin's mining security over time.
Unlike Bitcoin or Litecoin, Dogecoin has no fixed maximum supply. Issuance was originally random within a range and was fixed in 2015 to a flat 5 billion new DOGE per year, a rate that never halves — meaning Dogecoin's inflation rate (as a percentage of supply) declines over time simply because the fixed absolute issuance becomes a smaller share of an ever-larger base, but it never reaches Bitcoin-style scarcity.
Use cases and community
Dogecoin is used mainly as a payments and tipping token within its community, and has been accepted by a number of merchants for retail payments, but its price and attention cycles have historically been driven heavily by social-media sentiment and celebrity endorsement rather than protocol-level developments — worth factoring into any assessment of its volatility.
Tokenomics
| circulating-supply | — |
|---|---|
| max-supply | — |
| issuance-model | Uncapped by design; a fixed 5 billion new DOGE issued per year regardless of price, with no halving |
Last verified: 8 July 2026. before you rely on any figure — live circulating supply and market cap are never published here; check a live tracker.
Risks & criticisms
- No maximum supply cap means Dogecoin's long-run monetary policy differs fundamentally from Bitcoin's or Litecoin's — understand this before comparing them as substitutes.
- Price history shows some of the sharpest attention-driven volatility in the sector, tied closely to social-media and celebrity sentiment cycles.
- Development activity and protocol changes have historically been slower-paced than on many other top-20 assets — check the current state of the Dogecoin Foundation's roadmap.
Where to buy
Related buying guide
→ Dogecoin — related buying guideFrequently asked questions
Is there a maximum number of Dogecoin?
No. Dogecoin has no supply cap; a fixed 5 billion new DOGE is issued per year indefinitely, unlike Bitcoin's capped and halving schedule.
Is Dogecoin mined the same way as Bitcoin?
It uses proof-of-work like Bitcoin, but with the Scrypt algorithm (like Litecoin) rather than Bitcoin's SHA-256, and has been merge-mined with Litecoin since 2014.
Who created Dogecoin?
Software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer created it in December 2013 as a parody of the speculative altcoin market of that period.