·
21 Dec 2024
December 20, 2024 - Timothy Stebbing - Dogecoin Foundation
Introduction
Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency created in 2013 as a light-hearted response to Bitcoin. Initially created with intentionally 'ridiculous' parameters such as a yearly issuance of five billion new coins, Dogecoin was dismissed as a legitimate project by the crypto community but embraced by the Internet for it's memes and good-natured spirit of 'Do Only Good Everyday'.
The
Dogecoin Manifesto
calls Dogecoin 'The accidental crypto-movement that makes people smile', which reflects both Dogecoin's meteoric rise to Internet fame and the ironic twist of fate that meant it's tokenomics — with a predictable inflation curve (~3% diminishing over time) and fast block-times — are actually ideal as a global currency, free from tyranny, for all humanity.
Today Dogecoin is a veteran cryptocurrency with 11 years continuous, uninterrupted operation, a ~50 billion dollar market cap and the second most widely recognised brand in the crypto industry after only Bitcoin. In terms of traditional Proof of Work currencies Dogecoin has the second largest market cap in the world, also behind Bitcoin.
Where Bitcoin has diverted from Satoshi's original vision of 'Digital Cash' and pursued the ideal of being a Store of Value, Dogecoin has remained true to the mission and continues to grow into a world-leading Means of Exchange. As such Dogecoin's value is not tied to hype, but directly to Utility. The value of the Dogecoin ecosystem increases directly proportionate to Dogecoin's ability to fulfill its purpose as a currency used for exchanging every day goods and services.
It is to this end that the
Dogecoin Foundation
has been developing integration software — libraries and services aimed at bridging the gap as a payment mechanism, developing tools for grass-roots adoption in emerging economies, as well as growing the developer pool through advocacy and software that increases developer surface area.
Unlike many fly-by-night crypto projects, Dogecoin is fiercely decentralised with no initial developer 'lock-up' or ICO, and has been maintained by a diverse and sometimes adversarial developer community through donations and volunteer contributions. Since late 2021 the non-profit Dogecoin Foundation has operated a modest full-time development team which is funded through donations from a small number of dedicated benefactors who love Dogecoin.
Dogecoin History
Dogecoin 2013 - 2021
Created by Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus in 2013, Dogecoin rapidly developed into an internet-darling entirely based on it's good-natured approach, focus on helping those less fortunate, and on providing a fun and easy means of internet tipping.
For the first eight years Dogecoin's primary activity stemmed from internet tipping on platforms such as Reddit, where it enjoyed a community numbered in the millions. Community activity, sometimes entirely spontaneous and at other times coordinated by the early Dogecoin Foundation, revolved around community fund-raising events for needs that inspired internet support — Doge-4-Water which saw fresh water wells dug in Africa, Doge Nascar, and raising money to support the Jamaican Bob-sled team at the Olympics.
Dogecoin 2021 - Present
2021 was an inflection point for Dogecoin, with three major contributors leading to a crisis point. The 2021 GameStop run on Wall Street by a decentralised community of indie investors took on the big end of town which resulted in halt trading and exposed collusion and protectionism within the US Money markets and Dogecoin was thrown into the mix rising significantly. At the same time Elon Musk was approached by workers at his factories and asked to support Dogecoin, which he did, making public statements about Dogecoin's potential as a real alternative to fiat currency and appearing in an extensive Dogecoin-focused SNL. Finally the Dogecoin Core development team which had been maintaining the Dogecoin Core project for many years broke down at the peak of the cycle, splitting with differing opinions about Dogecoin's future, resulting in an 18 month crisis and fracturing of the community.
At the close of 2021, three of the then remaining Core team decided to re-boot the Dogecoin Foundation, which has continued to operate with a mandate to grow the scope of development, promote utility and adoption of Dogecoin. In early 2022 Timothy Stebbing, the first Foundation employee,
outlined the immediate vision
for the Dogecoin Foundation and established the Dogecoin Manifesto and principles that it would operate under to further the interests of the diverse and often contradictory Dogecoin community.
Over the next three years the Dogecoin Foundation would develop a range of open source projects:
libdogecoin
,
GigaWallet Payment Gateway
,
RadioDoge - Financial Inclusion for Unbanked
, as well as run
hackathons
, supported businesses in adopting Dogecoin, and encouraged and supported
key players
entering the space.
The Dogecoin Foundation's latest project
DogeBox
represents the progression from loose collective of projects to concrete development and distribution platform for the Dogecoin Ecosystem which we envisage will provide a rock-solid platform for the adoption of Dogecoin and the development of open source and commercial solutions for the Dogecoin community.
Dogecoin Outlook
Dogecoin has done the hard-yards over the last few years to build capability as a robust means of exchange and we believe 2025 will see the largest growth in utility and adoption to date, as the solutions for integration that we have been building over the last few years bare fruit through open source and commercial integration. We believe that Dogecoin growth is strongly tied to utility as a currency and adoption for payment, and our key focus areas are on grass-roots adoption in emerging economies, and see immediate opportunity for growth through providing drop-in instant payment solutions, interfacing with the 1.7 billion
unbanked
people of the world, and through streamlining the
remittance landscape
, estimated at approximately 1 trillion dollars annually.
As a measure of success we don't consider US dollar value an especially useful metric while cryptocurrency is still following a speculative hype based valuation, understanding that the true value of Dogecoin will settle as we move from speculative asset to utility based means of exchange. To this end the key metric for success, and the needle that most needs to be moved is TPM (Transactions Per Minute), which is a direct representation of usage on the Dogecoin network. Every project we are involved in directly or indirectly aims to raise Dogecoin's average TPM.
The Dogecoin Foundation is at a point where it has the solutions and in-house technical capability to work with industry through strategic partnerships to assist in the rapid development of solutions on the Dogecoin platform, which will in turn grow the utility of Dogecoin as a currency.
Grass-roots adoption
Top-down legislative outcomes for Dogecoin, in the manner of Bitcoin in El Salvador are highly unlikely until we gain real traction around the world. Dogecoin's brand consistency as a decade-old meme which has retained its virality is far more suited to gain global acceptance through grass-roots, bottom-up adoption. This is why our focus has been primarily toward enabling use as a currency in emerging economies, with the unbanked, and in industry verticals such as sports, gaming, social media where people-power sets the direction for adoption.
With the arrival of the DogeBox project, we intend to encourage the creation of regional 'install-fest' style Doge meetups and support groups, in the same vein as the 'Linux User group' phenomena of the 90s-00s. We see DogeBox as a solution for regular non-technical users to engage with the blockchain, hosting nodes, running online shops and implementing POS systems in brick & mortar stores through grass-roots, regional support networks. The role of the foundation will be to equip 'Dogecoin User Groups' with material, install media, brochures, stickers and support to establish regular meetups and plan social events. The current Dogecoin community already exhibits many of these traits and with the right support we believe this energy can be harnessed to promulgate broad Dogecoin adoption globally within a few years, as long as solutions developed provide real value to users.
Focus as a Means of Exchange
As already mentioned, the primary means for Dogecoin to grow its market cap is through adoption as a currency. Dogecoin's inflationary nature provides an economically ideal fixed inflation curve from 3-2% over the next 50 years, which makes it perfectly suited as an every-day currency.
Rapid adoption over the next three years in emerging economies and compatible industry verticals has the potential to see a 200-300% growth in value. Rather than the Bitcoin mantra of digital gold remaining a forever-speculative asset to hold, Dogecoin works best when it is put to work. To this end the Dogecoin Foundation is especially interested in assisting any projects that see Dogecoin used as a means of payment for goods and services.
Ecosystem Growth
The Dogecoin Ecosystem represents the combined software and companies surrounding the Dogecoin blockchain. We recognise that for utility to grow through adoption there needs to be incentives for startups and industry leaders to implement Dogecoin integrations into their products.
The Dogecoin Foundation has been working diligently toward providing open source tools and services to close the gap, making adoption by industry more viable. This is critical and under-appreciated work without which Dogecoin will stagnate.
We are now approaching the point where open source software is ready for adoption and we envisage opportunity for numerous for-profit businesses to take these tools and commercialise them to assist in bringing Dogecoin payment solutions to a wider non-technical audience.
Remittances
Approximately one trillion dollars of remittances are made globally each year, with the lions share being channeled through exploitative middle-men such as Western Union. Low income international workers sending money home to family often lose up to 30% in fees. Dogecoin represents an opportunity to capture this market with its low-fee, fast transfer speed. This is a vertical in need of supporting apps and in some cases political diplomacy to help nations like India for instance understand the value to their economy by allowing Dogecoin for remittances.
Countries with high incoming remittances that embrace Dogecoin are in a strong position to create a kind of circular economy where incoming Dogecoin can be exchanged locally for fiat, and the exchange or central bank can then sell that Dogecoin back to the international market. Furthermore by reducing the fees for remittances from 30% to well under 1% represents more wealth staying in the country rather than being siphoned off by international middle-men.
We identify this as a wildly untapped market waiting to be capitalised on, the status quo for remittances has not changed greatly since the 80s and it is a green-field waiting to be tapped into which would dramatically increase Dogecoin's TPM and utility.
Payment Solutions
One of the leading barriers for mass adoption of Dogecoin has been the technical hurdles to accept payments in an automated fashion. The Dogecoin Foundation has build GigaWallet, a Payment Gateway that runs on the DogeBox platform or in the cloud and provides convenient APIs for accepting and transacting Dogecoin on a large scale. While it is ready to go, it still requires integration with the relevant systems, and is constrained by the 1 minute block-time of Dogecoin.
The nature of layer one currencies such as Dogecoin, Bitcoin or Fiat, is the concept of time to finality, and the solutions provided to close the gap between actual finality and instant-payments required for retail use. With the traditional fiat system, finality (money in your bank account) can take up to 24 hours which is far too long to wait for your coffee in the morning. To solve this problem the fiat system has credit providers such as Mastercard and Visa which provide pre-approved micro-loans so that digital fiat transactions, such as when you tap for your coffee, appear instant.
Cryptocurrency is no different. Bitcoin has a 10 minute block rate and therefore the Bitcoin Lightning Network was conceived as a decentralised means of providing pre-approved micro-loans so that instant payment could be made. Unfortunately the lightning network has suffered exploits and requires it's users to load up Bitcoin in advance which makes it inconvenient.
Dogecoin has a 1 minute block rate, and depending on the risk appetite, very fast finality compared to fiat and Bitcoin. However 1 minute is still unacceptable for a busy coffee shop and so Dogecoin too needs a mechanism for instant-payments.
In each of these scenarios what is being managed is risk. Risk that a payment is not valid, and in the case of crypto-currencies, risk of a 'double-spend' event where a payment seems good but has already been spent elsewhere. While the Visa and Mastercard networks appear to carry the risk for vendors, in actuality retail stores and wholesalers will tell you they wear the risk of charge-backs and customer challenges that often go against the vendor.
The Dogecoin Foundation has been working on a new, open Payment Protocol called Doge Connect which is still in development, that streamlines the payment-request process and provides a decentralised network of Payment Relays run by the community which can provide variable solutions for relaying payment, gaining appropriate confirmation on the blockchain and relaying that to the vendor's systems in real-time.
This protocol is intentionally designed so that the vendor can select their risk appetite based on their requirements, and this opens the door for a company or startups to provide types of Payment Relays that covers this risk for a fee. Timothy Stebbing has also proposed a solution that would be able to execute ZeroConf (instant) Payments for vendors using the Doge Connect protocol, guaranteeing payment to the vendor for a small % fee, much cheaper than the current Visa and Mastercard % rate. The Dogecoin Foundation envisage a broad marketplace of providers who can implement the Doge Connect protocols to provide instant verification as a service, making Dogecoin payments the ideal solution for retail environments.
POS integrations already exist, most notably
DogeExpress
which provides ready-to-go POS terminals for retail outlets. With the vast number of incumbent POS providers in the world, we suspect that standards-based protocols such as Doge Connect will provide high value integration points for existing POS companies to integrate Dogecoin payments, which will grow in demand as Dogecoin adoption increases. These solutions and protocols need to be in place ahead of the adoption curve to avoid a tangled mess of competing implementations. This is an area which the Dogecoin Foundation is committed to spending time and resources as available to ensure a soft landing for incoming industry.
1.7 Billion Unbanked
There are approximately 1.7 billion humans on the planet without access to currency or financial instruments of any kind. These are also some of the most vulnerable people to exploitation on the planet. Many communities are intentionally denied services so that they can be exploited for their goods and services by organisations that on-sell their products for vastly inflated profits, and governments in many countries are complicit in these activities.
Dogecoin, through the RadioDoge experiment can provide an answer to these problems, at the same time as building a massive grass-roots user-base with the most vulnerable people in emerging economies. The Dogecoin Foundation has built an HF Radio and LoRaWan solution with Starling back-haul that can be deployed in remote regions and provide a means of exchange to people in areas without internet access or consistent power.
In 2024 we established contact with a network of VSLAs (Village Savings & Loan Associations) across four African countries willing to commit to a trial in 24 villages. Unfortunately due to funding constraints this vision remains an unrealised dream.
The opportunity for Dogecoin to provide a solution to the problem of the global unbanked, and in turn to see a massive rise in adoption of Dogecoin for payment, is a huge opportunity waiting to be explored. The Dogecoin Foundation would be interested in speaking with anyone who would like to sponsor the continuation and potential commercialisation of this technology.
Challenges Ahead
Dogecoin remains the most promising blockchain technology focused on Satoshi's original vision of digital cash, and with it's meme-based virality and Do-Only-Good-Everyday sentiment is strongly positioned to grow into it's intended purpose as long as it can face the challenges of growth and adapt to change. Here are some of the hurdles that lay ahead for the Dogecoin community.
Throughput
Despite having significantly faster parameters than Bitcoin, Dogecoin still has theoretical maximums for TPM that are currently too low to sustain the kinds of traffic Visa or Mastercard are capable of. Elon Musk once said that if Dogecoin were to 10x the block-rate and 10x the block size it would 'win hands down'. These changes are not as simple however as just changing those parameters in the code.
Affecting protocol change on the Dogecoin network requires convincing 51% of the network that a change is beneficial and to update their node software to match the intended changes. Numerous attempts have been made by bad actors over the years via various means to trick of coerce the network to change it's parameters, these are always easily spotted by the attentive Dogecoin Community.
Real protocol change requires bringing the community along for the journey, and convincing people that the changes being made are the best option for Dogecoin's future. Currently there is a strong incentive for Dogecoin to continue the process of forever-tracking Bitcoin code-changes, however we believe that Bitcoin has diverged from it's course as a means of exchange, and therefore Dogecoin would be better served following it's own path.
The Dogecoin Foundation's DogeBox project has been specifically designed to create a platform for developers to experiment and surface new ideas to the community where they can be demonstrated and tried, and the appropriate discussions had. There are many potential futures for Dogecoin at the protocol level and to scale as a global payment solution change will have to be made.
Regulatory
Dogecoin does not operate in a bubble, but is subject to the regulatory constraints of every nation on the planet. Certainly in North America, Crypto has experienced a long period of negative attention from government, however it seems the winds are changing with crypto-friendly government coming in. It becomes imperative that Dogecoin put its best foot forward through education, especially with governments to explain how decentralised currencies benefit and not hinder their national sovereignty. This is an ongoing area of concern and one that we continue to monitor and respond to, however the future looks bright.
Decentralisation
As a decentralised network, Dogecoin continually faces the challenge of centralisation. It is a force that is tireless in its efforts to control the network, primarily motivated by profit and economies-of-scale that drive centralisation of infrastructure and resources. Centralisation of mining is an ongoing concern, as well as centralisation of holdings through custodial centralised exchanges. Furthermore lack of developer diversity and implementation diversity within the Dogecoin Ecosystem is something that we continue to work against, with events to foster new developers with fresh ideas, such as our Hackathon events.
Conclusion
Dogecoin provides a unique and profitable landscape for investment from new startups and existing industries looking to adopt crypto currency or provide crypto services. As one of the longest surviving chains with highly desirable parameters for 'digital cash' and as a means of exchange, Dogecoin is primed for the next evolution in it's journey from light-hearted meme to disruptive global currency, free from tyranny for all humanity. We welcome all interested parties to explore the space, and to get involved in building the future of global finance.
Timothy Stebbing, Dogecoin Foundation
Timothy Stebbing
@tjstebbing
Follow
Christian, Husband, Dad. Director
@DogecoinFdn
, Founder
@SuchPay
, Building decentralised currency, free from tyranny for all humanity.
