Dogecoin Was Up 17% Last Week as Cofounder Wants It Accepted as Legit ‘Digital Currency’

Billy Markus tweets that his created coin has a legitimate use case for payment and tipping compared to other wannabe cryptos.

Key points

• In a series of Twitter posts yesterday, Dogecoin (DOGE) cofounder Billy Markus shared that the project needs to stop using the phrase “meme coin” and completely reposition DOGE as a viable “digital currency.”
• Tesla CEO — and Dogecoin advocate — Elon Musk has been saying that very thing for months.
• While DOGE is down 2% at press time, it’s had a healthy run up 17% over the past seven days and a 26% pump over the past 30 days, according to CoinMarketCap.

Don’t call popular dog-themed cryptocurrency project Dogecoin (DOGE) a joke or meme coin — at least not to its cofounder Billy Markus. In a series of Twitter posts yesterday — using his Twitter handle Shibetoshi Nakamoto — the co-creator of DOGE strongly stated that marketers of the project at the Dogecoin Foundation need to reposition the project as a legitimate digital currency. “There’s already infinite digital speculation and digital utility tokens and chains, and pointless speculation tokens are made daily. Dogecoin is in the best position to be the most used for purchasing and tipping,” Markus stated in his tweets.

He also encouraged his 1.2 million Twitter followers and Dogecoin holders to help build up and support the project. ”You can contribute directly to the core code, you can contribute to one of the many projects the Dogecoin Foundation is spearheading. Nothing stops you from helping the thing that you want to succeed. Speculation has brought attention. Work brings utility,” Markus wrote.

As background, Dogecoin has been around for nearly a decade since its breakaway hard fork from Litecoin in December 2013. The Dogecoin founders originally saw it as a whimsical dog-themed digital asset intended to inject fun into the tech-heavy crypto space and position it as a Bitcoin alternative at the time. While that branding worked then, Markus now wants the focus to shift away from fun to refocus on financial viability and use.

Elon Musk has said DOGE is a superior digital currency

During a feature article in TIME this past December, Tesla/Space-X CEO Elon Musk said that Dogecoin was a superior form of digital payment versus Bitcoin — supporting the very premise of Markus’ recent tweets.

“Even though it was created as a silly joke, Dogecoin is better suited for transactions. The total transaction flow — transactions per day — that you can do with Dogecoin has much higher potential than Bitcoin. It [Dogecoin] is slightly inflationary, but that inflationary number is a fixed number as opposed to a percentage. Which means that over time, its percentage of inflation decreases. That’s actually good because it encourages people to spend it rather than hoard [Dogecoin] as a store of value.”

Should you buy?

As of this writing DOGE is down 2% on the day and more than 80% from its all-time high of $ 0.74 in May 2021, however, it had managed solid gains of 17% and 26% over the past week and month respectively, according to CoinMarketCap data. That data also shows the token is currently ranked 12th among crypto projects with a total market value of $18.9 billion.

This discussion is merely opinion and not financial advice. Investors should always do their own research, especially regarding a speculative project such as DOGE. However, there are many other crypto options related to the metaverse, NFTs, and decentralized finance that hold better potential without the need to offload any “meme coin” baggage.