A cryptocurrency created as a joke about a dog meme now has a market cap above $2 billion

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A cryptocurrency created as a joke about a dog meme now has a market cap above $2 billion

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  • Dogecoin, the digital currency inspired by the popular Doge meme, now has a market capitalization above $2 billion.
  • Its founder is worried the coin's recent rise indicates wider frothiness in the cryptocurrency market.


Dogecoin, the alternative cryptocurrency inspired by a popular 2013 meme, has surged over the weekend and now has a market capitalization over $2 billion.

It soared above the $1 billion milestone on Christmas Day and has continued to hit new milestones. As for its price, the coin was trading at $0.018 on Sunday. Still, that's up from $0.00000021 a coin at the beginning of December.

Founder Jackson Palmer, who created the digital currency as a joke, said new found interest in Dogecoin is a concerning indicator of wide-spread frothiness in the cryptocurrency market.

"I have a lot of faith in the Dogecoin Core development team to keep the software stable and secure, but I think it says a lot about the state of the cryptocurrency space in general that a currency with a dog on it which hasn't released a software update in over 2 years has a $1B+ market cap," Palmer told cryptocurrency watcher CoinDesk.

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Wall Street has been raising red-flags about a bubble in the market. In fact, UBS chief economist Paul Donovan said cryptocurrencies are in "the bubble to end all bubbles."

"A twenty-fold increase in bitcoin prices in just two years, and an absence of any fundamental economic backing, cryptocurrency prices are almost certainly a bubble," Donovan wrote in an October memo.

As for Dogecoin, Palmer, a group product manager at Adobe, and Billy Markus, a software engineer at IBM, created it "without much real thought," according to reporting by Motherboard.

As Palmer told Motherboard's Patrick McGuire, "one night after work, I sat down with a beer, I had too much time on my hands, and I bought Dogecoin.com."

Markus stepped in to help make Dogecoin an actual currency.

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The name of the coin is an homage to the popular internet meme known as Doge, which became popular in 2013 and features the face of a dog with comic sans texts in the background.

This is the meme:

doge

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