In 2024 “meme coins” have become a bona fide phenomenon in crypto. Although, statistically, finding a successful memecoin is far less likely than winning at a casino, users keep creating network effects around a market that is anything but a “joke”.
On 13 August the daily revenue of the platform for launching memecoins, Pump Fun, exceeded $5m, outpacing all protocols and blockchains on that score. The hype—and the urge to be at the epicentre of memecoin mania—continues to deliver serious dividends to beneficiaries, but such trends rarely endure, simply because of their game-like nature.
Even so, every rule has an exception. Some tokens can evolve from a joke into a sizeable, less playful project. As time has shown, Dogecoin is a vivid example of such a transformation into a global asset. Oleg CashCoin examined how the “dog coin’s” technical and economic infrastructure now works.
A pioneering dog
A vast community and a rich history have turned Dogecoin into a technology project with its own philosophy and development plans. Although development stalled for roughly 18 months after 2019, Elon Musk, who has actively promoted the memecoin, managed to rekindle broader interest in the cryptocurrency and its ecosystem.
In August 2021 the Dogecoin Foundation was revived. Advisers to the non-profit include Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, Jared Birchall, a long-time Musk associate and head of his family office, Dogecoin co-creator Billy Markus, and developer Max Keller.
It is also known that Musk was among those who financed Dogecoin’s development and wanted to create a social network on a blockchain where the memecoin would likely be used.
Not exactly a road map
In 2022 the Dogecoin Foundation published a plan for DOGE. The project does not have a road map in the usual sense; instead there is a set of community initiatives aimed at expanding acceptance by increasing ways to use the memecoin.
The foundation compared DOGE’s mission to the Roman denarius, which could be spent anywhere across the empire and even beyond. Enthusiasts essentially want to make the coin convenient for all possible forms of payment.
A more concrete plan of action includes securing Dogecoin by diversifying the network through updated, faster nodes. There is also an emphasis on simplifying the integration of DOGE into payment services, retail stores, game developers and social platforms.
Simplification and standards
Until 2022 interacting with the DOGE blockchain was hampered by the absence of shared documentation for developers. One task for the Dogecoin Foundation, therefore, is to produce educational materials and organise information across repositories.
The community intends to diversify away from reliance on the core wallet as the only way to work with the Dogecoin blockchain, and to make it easier to install new software implementations and nodes.
This stage includes creating and maintaining resources for communication and protocol-improvement proposals, as well as forums and other web resources.
The main goal, however, is to foster diversity in the software used to interact with the DOGE blockchain.
An enterprise service
Because the foundation aims to spread the coin as a convenient means of payment, its members have set about building the tools to realise that vision.
The main emphasis is on special services that give platforms and services the ability to integrate DOGE not only on websites but also in mobile applications.
The point is to let online shops, exchanges, swap services and social networks implement Dogecoin transactions as easily as they would with traditional payment providers.
The key difference is that developers preserve the non-custodial nature of all operations for users—keeping control of funds with the holder until a transaction is confirmed.
Two projects are leading this work: GigaWallet, a two-tier API service for processing and verifying DOGE transactions, and the Dogecoin Keyring App & SDK, geared towards mobile integration.
Experiments with the dog
The community is experimenting with transmitting transactions via Starlink and radio waves instead of a conventional internet connection.
The initiative proposes that Dogecoin nodes could operate without the internet—using only satellite connectivity. RadioDoge is a decentralised communications network that uses the blockchain and a combination of radio-frequency technologies to provide connectivity in regions with limited or no access.
The first DOGE transaction via RadioDoge was carried out in April 2022. The project has a fully working prototype, though it is still in beta.
No less interesting, and seriously discussed in the community, is a move to the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) algorithm. Although the foundation named this a priority, there have been no updates since 2022—only discussions without concrete numbers, with Buterin as the main actor with experience in changing the algorithm.
Side projects and those on ice
As part of experiments to implement smart-contract functionality on the DOGE blockchain, the Dogecoin ecosystem gained the DRC-20 token standard. In mid-2023, interest in it drove daily transactions to a record 2.08m.
The asset is also used to sell Tesla merch. Since 2022 some unique items on the automaker’s website can be bought for the memecoin. And SpaceX, another Musk company, in early February allowed Geometric Energy Corporation to to rebook the lunar launch of the DOGE-1 satellite. It was reported that the mission was paid for entirely with Dogecoin.
Although the Dogecoin Foundation’s road map includes a section on developing second-layer solutions on the largest memecoin, the community has yet to present a full implementation.
In 2022 a project called Dogechain appeared, which used a cross-chain bridge to move DOGE into its PoS network. However, working L2 solutions, as in Ethereum, remain absent.