Software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer introduced Dogecoin on the 6th of December 2013. They designed the project as a joke to mock wild speculation surrounding Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies at that time.
The value jumped nearly three hundred percent in seventy-two hours on the 19th of December 2013. Three days later the price dropped by eighty percent due to large mining pools exploiting small computing power required for mining.
The Dogecoin community established a fundraiser on the 19th of January 2014 to raise fifty thousand dollars for the team. By the second day they had donated thirty-six thousand dollars worth of Dogecoin and saw the exchange rate rise by fifty percent.
Elon Musk tweeted One Word: Doge on the 20th of December 2020 causing the value to rise by twenty percent shortly afterward. The price hit eight cents by February 2021 after tweets from Snoop Dogg and Gene Simmons supported the currency.
Dogecoin uses scrypt technology in its proof-of-work algorithm which prevents miners from using standard SHA-256 Bitcoin mining equipment. Originally the currency had a randomized reward system but changed to a static block reward in March 2014 creating consistent inflation without any supply cap unlike Bitcoin.