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Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency named after a viral dog meme from years past, has hit an all-time high this month. Here’s how Gen Z and its inherent love of memes carried the movement.
Getting your head around the frantically changing world of cryptocurrency can be tricky, but the explosion of dogecoin essentially boils down to the fact that Gen Z really loves memes.
Though it seems like cryptocurrency has surged into the mainstream in recent times, it’s actually existed for 13 years.
In that time, physical banking has slowly given way to online banking where we use mobile apps to manage our finances and make simple exchanges.
What cryptocurrency offers is the allure of decentralised peer-to-peer transactions, where no middleman is required at all – no bank, no government agency, just a fancy supercomputer.
Generally, those hot on cryptocurrency fall into two categories. There are the traders who are obsessed by the potential to make profit from trading in one of 4000 unique digital coins, and then there are those who see cryptocurrency as a means to protect their wealth from the possibility of financial turmoil in their own countries.
Amidst the explosion of NFTs and GameStop’s hijacking of the stock market, however, there’s another class of cryto-buff emerging today. One that’s in it purely for the memes.
The rise of dogecoin
The re-emergence of cryptocurrency in its now 4000+ forms has brought with it countless proclamations of how each will ‘change the world.’
Each company’s founders have their own grand vision for their specific product, and yet less than 10% of this portion have actually made any notable impact on the market.
It’s one of life’s constants that wherever people are taking themselves too seriously, there will always be others laughing at them and satirising what they’re doing. In essence, that’s what dogecoin is built to do.
Dogecoin – pronounced ‘doje coin’ – was created by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer to poke fun at popular exchanges like bitcoin back in 2013.
Adopting one of 2013’s most popular and random memes – the Shiba Inu dog – as its logo and namesake, the question of whether dogecoin has any actual use is still debatable eight years on.
Despite this, dogecoin has somehow remained a big player in cryptocurrency since its creation, with investment largely driven by rabid online communities on Twitter and Reddit. Why? Because the whole thing is pretty damn funny.
‘Dogecoin is like this kind of big F-U to the system,’ said Avi Felman, head of trading at BlockTower Capital. ‘It’s like, ‘‘Yeah, this thing can have value too, and I’m just going to buy it, because I’m going to buy it.’’
