In just a month, interest in DOGE has soared, pushing its market cap to $9 billion and eliciting a stronger response from developers.
Crypto Enthusiasts Are in Puppy Love with DOGE
Dogecoin never set out with quite the lofty aspirations of the blockchain it was forked out of on December 6, 2013. Rather, Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus thought of DOGE as a mockery of cryptocurrency space.
Fast-forward to 2020 and Twitter and DOGE has been picking up steam, slowly but steadily. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has flirted with the currency on social media, posting whimsical tweets on the lines of “D is for DOGE,” and “Who let the DOGE out?”
Misconstrued as an endorsement, interest in the currency spiked around the same times the tech-billionaire was poking fun at it, something he confirmed earlier this year, arguing that his statements regarding DOGE ought to be taken as a joke.
Yet, in the flurry of the WallStreetBets GameStop saga, the popular Reddit forum, which took on the heavyweights from Wall Street, decided to give DOGE a shot, pushing bullishly for the $1 threshold.
Still far from reach, DOGE is enjoying a renewed élan on a development level and its biggest weakness, a lack of real-world technological application, may yet change should interest in the Shiba Inu-fashioned token remain steadfast.
With interest already surging, Ross Nicoll, the maintainer for the token, has been receiving new requests through Github, an open-source development environment, and he seems happy to roll up his sleeves, too.
Dogecoin’s post-WallStreetBets rally has remained modest but steady, with the currency hitting a $9 billion market cap and the price of a sole token standing at $0.07333, up from $0.00140 when it all started.
Can You Teach an Old DOGE New Tricks?
The biggest question remains whether Nicoll and fellow developers can muster the technological prowess to give DOGE a new purpose, beyond the meme it was meant to be. There is a lot that the DOGE blockchain can do to improve, and finding a real-world purpose is certainly a good starting point.
Syncing is not optimized as Dogecoin nodes are based on a default setting that only allows outbound connections, but inbound ones are often ignored, giving the entire process of transacting DOGE a bit of a haphazard aftertaste.
While a bit of an awkward problem, given that there are dozens of other tokens that run smoothly already, Nicoll seems confident he can sort the issue out. The DOGE’s greatest asset is that it’s based on Bitcoin, and that comes with intrinsic stability and safety, said Maximillian Keller, a Dogecoin developer, speaking to CoinDesk.
DOGE seems to have no glaring technical faults, and attacking the network while feasible, would cost a pricey $8 million to anyone who wishes to try, say CoinDesk analysts.
Dogecoin clearly has inherent benefits, such as its 300-terahashes hash rate, which is above Bitcoin’s but yet endorsement for the currency is still risky. Reinventing DOGE from a meme to a real-world asset would probably take a while.
Would DOGE have the final laugh?