Dogecoin: How Funny Yellow Shiba Went to the Moon
AnalysisBit News Today2 min read
Dogecoin began in December 2013 as a parody built on the Shiba Inu meme and spent its early years funding bobsledders, a water well and a NASCAR car before becoming one of the most talked-about coins of early 2021. The table traces that path from launch to the February 2021 record driven by Reddit traders, Elon Musk, Snoop Dogg and Gene Simmons.
| Date | Milestone | Figures and details |
|---|---|---|
| 6 Dec 2013 | Launch | Created by Billy Markus, an IBM engineer in Portland, and Jackson Palmer of Adobe in Sydney |
| 19 Dec 2013 | First rally | Price rose almost 300% in 72 hours to $0.00095; market value reached about $8 million within two weeks of launch |
| 25 Dec 2013 | Dogewallet hack | Millions of coins stolen; the SaveDogemas drive covered the losses about a month later |
| 19 Jan 2014 | Jamaican bobsled appeal | Goal of $50,000 for the Sochi Olympics team; $36,000 pledged by the second day |
| 22 Mar 2014 | Doge4Water | Campaign with Charity: Water drew over 4,000 donors and over $30,000 for a well in Kenya's Tana river basin |
| 25 Mar 2014 | NASCAR sponsorship | Ð67.8 million, about $55,000, raised for Josh Wise, who won a fan vote into the May All-Star Race |
| Mid-2015 | 100 billionth coin mined | From then about Ð5 billion added yearly with no hard cap; block reward Ð10,000, one-minute blocks |
| 7 Jan 2018 | Bull-market peak | $0.017 per coin, market capitalisation close to $2 billion |
| 20 Dec 2020 | Musk's first Doge post | Coin's value rose about 20% after the tweet |
| Late Jan 2021 | Reddit wave | Price jumped more than 800% in 24 hours to $0.07 amid the GameStop short squeeze |
| 4 Feb 2021 | Musk tweets again | Calls it the people's crypto; price climbs roughly 40-50% |
| 6 Feb 2021 | Celebrities pile in | Snoop Dogg posts a Shiba Inu meme of himself; Gene Simmons styles himself God of Dogecoin |
| 7-8 Feb 2021 | Record high | About $0.084 on CoinMarketCap, up 65% in 24 hours; market value briefly hit $10.5 billion |
Sources: Wikipedia, CNBC, Bloomberg, Forklog, FXStreet.