Despite its satirical nature, some consider it a legitimate investment prospect. Dogecoin features the face of Kabosu from the " doge " meme as its logo and namesake. With the help of Reddit , the site became an instant hit. They wanted to create a peer-to-peer digital currency that could reach a broader demographic than Bitcoin.
In addition, they wanted to distance it from the controversial history of other coins. Palmer is credited with making the idea a reality. At the time, he was a member of the Adobe marketing department in Sydney , Australia. Markus reached out to Palmer after seeing the site, and started efforts to develop the currency. Markus designed Dogecoin's protocol based on existing cryptocurrencies Luckycoin and Litecoin , [ 15 ] which use scrypt technology in their proof-of-work algorithm.
This growth occurred during a time when Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies were reeling from China's decision to forbid Chinese banks from investing in the Bitcoin economy.
On December 25, , the first major theft of Dogecoin occurred when millions of coins were stolen during a hack on the online cryptocurrency wallet platform Dogewallet. To help those who lost funds on Dogewallet after its breach, the Dogecoin community started an initiative named "SaveDogemas" to help donate coins to those who had them stolen. Approximately one month later, enough money was donated to cover all of the coins that were stolen. In January , the trading volume of Dogecoin briefly surpassed that of all other cryptocurrencies combined.
However, its market capitalization remained substantially behind that of Bitcoin. Initially, Dogecoin featured a randomized reward that is received for each mining block. However, in March , this behaviour was updated to a static block reward. His co-founder, Billy Markus, agreed that Palmer's position was generally valid. On May 9, , SpaceX announced a rideshare mission to the Moon completely funded by Dogecoin, thus becoming the first space mission funded by a cryptocurrency.
