Dogecoin Activity Surges With Ordinals—But a Core DOGE Dev Is Skeptical

Dogecoin hit a new all-time high of 719,000 daily transactions on Tuesday, thanks to their newly created standard–DRC-20–which allows for the creation of meme coins on the Dogecoin network.

This number of daily transactions even surpassed BTC, which registered 566,000 daily transactions yesterday.

Dogecoin users have copied the architecture enabled by Ordinals, and created their very own “Doginals.” These tokens, which are a lot like NFTs, are driving a surge in transactions on the blockchain, similar to what the spike in transactions on Bitcoin has been over the past couple weeks.

The newly created DRC-20 standard is similar to Bitcoin’s BRC-20, which allows arbitrary and non-financial data to be included in blocks. Users on Dogecoin have thrown themselves towards inscribing tokens into “shibes,” the smallest denomination of dogecoins, and tracking them throughout the network.

Despite the recent spike and interest in Doginals, the craze could be short lived.

“Something like this cannot become a real ‘feature’ because it has not had enough thought given to it”, Dogecoin core developer Patrick Lodder told Decrypt.  He added that “sustained and growing pressure on Dogecoin will cause this to die off quickly.”

Lodder also said that the main risk is “under-engineering” and he “hasn’t discovered a good way to program these tokens and give it actual function in a trustless way, like you can on an ERC-20 token.”

Dogecoin daily transactions are usually quite stable, at around 20,000 per day, but data shows that over the past week they have spiked and been extremely volatile. May 10th saw the first impressive increase. Just one day after the rollout of the DRC-20 standard, transactions surpassed 450,000.

The network then saw a huge transactional dropout a few days later, only to gather momentum yesterday, seeing more than 700,000 transactions—enough to surpass Bitcoin.

Whether these transaction volumes are here to stay or simply a fad is anyone’s guess, but it seems the meme coin mania is reaching new heights in 2023.