February 26, 2020
DOGE overall health is down 17.59% in the past six months, driven by a 30.59% decline in Developer Behavior, and 12.77% drop in User Activity. Price has dropped 5.7% in the same time frame.
What is Dogecoin?
Dogecoin (DOGE) is a cryptocurrency that was forked from Litecoin in Dec 2013, at the height of the Doge meme craze. At the time, one Bitcoin was worth 1,083.14 USD and Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer thought that cryptocurrency was being taken too seriously, so they created a coin with the face of a Shiba Inu dog on it.
The coin has garnered a dedicated fanbase over the years and is mostly used as a tip on certain social media sites as a reward for quality content. Dogecoin is commonly known as the “friendly” coin, and has been known for its charitable donations and other good causes.
Long Live Dogecoin
DOGE FCAS is down 131-points (17.59%) in the past six months, driven by a 186-point (30.59%) decline in Developer Behavior, and 119-point (12.77%) drop in User Activity. In the meantime Market Maturity has increased by 142-points (21.85%).
According to Jackson Palmer, the cryptocurrency’s founder, dogecoin has seen a broad decline on the development side, “New features aren’t being implemented into dogecoin because there’s no active development anymore. Eventually, it will become outdated. And with that, the network will organically wind down.” According to the Dogecoin GitHub page, no changes have been made to the code since November 8th, 2019, and contributions have essentially ceased since.
Yet the cryptocurrency continues to be used by a group of people that together trade anywhere between $20M and more than $180M per day. There are nearly 123 billion Dogecoin in circulation right now (versus a maximum of 21 million Bitcoins). This strong liquidity makes Dogecoin great for small transactions, which is why it is used for tipping and donations. Over the past year, DOGE has had more transactions per day than Monero (XMR), Dash (DASH), and Zcash (ZEC).
Our Hot Take
Dogecoin is a testament to the arbitrariness and unpredictability of the speculative hype that persists in the crypto space. What started off as a complete joke, expanded out into more serious endeavors, with the community raising money to fund the Jamaican bobsled team in 2014 and water wells in Kenya the same year. However, later that year a major scam caused a fissure in the community, and Dogecoin co-founder, Jackson Palmer, left the network. Since then the Dogecoin Foundation, which runs all Dogecoin funded community initiatives, seems to have died down.
The coin is ultimately just another fork of the Bitcoin source code, and anyone could fork Dogecoin and “improve” it tomorrow by further tweaking the variables. The issue remains that this oversaturation of crypto assets renders them inherently useless as the blockchain network in which they exist gets split with every fork. An asset’s value needs to go beyond hype and speculation to last the test of time.
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