Rise of Doge
In the beginning, there was the dog. Not just any dog—a Shiba Inu, peering with meme-worthy incredulity out of a low-resolution photo, captioned with words like “Wow,” “Much curious,” “So amaze.” The image was ridiculous, the kind of silly, early-Internet artifact that someone scrolled past at 3 a.m. and snorted at, forgetting it immediately.
Except they didn’t forget. And neither did a couple of programmers who, one cold December day in 2013, decided to take that dog and turn it into a cryptocurrency. Dogecoin began as a kind of gag: Bitcoin, but with none of the gravitas, the libertarian gold-rush energy, or the lofty, world-saving promises. A currency built around a joke seemed like the right kind of satire for a moment when nobody could tell what was real anymore.
Billy Markus, one of Dogecoin’s co-creators, didn’t expect anyone to take it seriously. But that’s the thing about the Internet—it doesn’t care about intent. It only cares about momentum.
Momentum is a force, especially in the digital age. And Dogecoin—a coin with a bright, cartoon dog logo and an ethos that can best be described as “fun”—had it. People began sharing it, tipping it to each other online like pocket change, using it to sponsor niche causes: a Jamaican bobsled team here, clean water in Kenya there. It was harmless, earnest, and endearingly absurd—qualities that stood out in an increasingly cynical world.
And then something strange happened. People began believing.
The joke, it turned out, was an antidote to the seriousness of crypto culture, where Bitcoin evangelists preached decentralization like it was a new religion and Ethereum developers spoke of smart contracts in a language that seemed indecipherable. Dogecoin had none of that—it was the goofy younger sibling, crashing the party with no intention of talking policy. It made crypto accessible, unintimidating.
The cultural moment shifted in Dogecoin’s favor when the broader crypto market surged, making billionaires out of early adopters and proving that digital money wasn’t a passing fad. By 2020, Bitcoin’s valuation was reaching dizzying heights, and Dogecoin—the scrappy underdog with “dog” in its name—was along for the ride. Elon Musk, in his role as part-time CEO of the Internet, began tweeting about Dogecoin with a straight face, calling it “the people’s crypto.” The thing about a joke, though, is that when someone with power laughs, it stops being funny. Suddenly, Dogecoin was everywhere: climbing charts, headlining news stories, generating unimaginable wealth for anyone who’d held on since the beginning.
The rise of Dogecoin revealed something profound about this era of financialization and memes: belief itself is value. For years, central banks and economists have debated what makes money “money”—trust, utility, scarcity? Dogecoin subverted it all. It was worth something because people decided it was.
At its peak, Dogecoin was worth more than $80 billion. Its market cap eclipsed that of major corporations built on decades of labor and real-world products. But while many laughed at its absurdity, others saw in Dogecoin a parable for the strange and fractured nature of modern life. How a dog on the Internet could become a fortune is an encapsulation of what it means to live now—online, untethered, where meaning is fluid, and reality depends on consensus.
Billy Markus sold his Dogecoin early and used the money to buy a used Honda Civic. “It’s just a silly joke coin,” he said at the time. But Dogecoin was never just a joke. It was an artifact of our time, a reminder that what we value doesn’t have to make sense. Sometimes, all it takes is a dog, a meme, and a little belief.