Dogecoin (DOGE) Sees Stellar Usage Amid Crypto Bear Market

Dogecoin (DOGE) is often painted as a “joke” in the cryptosphere, as the asset itself is based on the Doge meme of yesteryear. Yet, many diehards and analysts have claimed that DOGE and its constituents aren’t some to laugh at. Instead, the project, co-founded by Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus, should be a model cryptocurrency network, as it remains an actively-used network, even amid 2018’s market downturn.

Kevin Rooke, a Canadian cryptocurrency researcher with a penchant for the internet’s favorite meme currency, recently took to Twitter to accentuate the fact the asset’s underlying network has lasted the test of time.

Dogecoin is averaging more daily active addresses in December 2018 than December 2017. Dogecoin also has more daily active addresses than all cryptocurrencies except Bitcoin and Ethereum. Much users. Many adoption. 🐶 pic.twitter.com/cu7nAWHgGt — Kevin Rooke (@kerooke) December 17, 2018

Rooke, citing data from Messari’s OnChainFX noted that Dogecoin is third only to Bitcoin and Ethereum in terms of daily active addresses, amounting to 72,955 in the past day. To give this figure some much-needed perspective, Bitcoin touts 536,738 active addresses, and Ethereum has 235,004, while Tron, for example, has a relatively mere 21,255.

The Canadian crypto insider also noted that Dogecoin’s current active address count is higher than December 2017’s average, indicating that DOGE’s use in micropayments, community tipping, and rapid, censorship-resistant, and immutable transactions remain a promising offering in the eyes of crypto’s users. This is just the tip of the iceberg, however, as Dogecoin has outperformed in terms of 24-hour transactional value. Over the past day, the network transacted $264 million worth of value through 29,949 transactions — reportedly ousting Ethereum’s $163 million.

This isn’t the time that Rooke has drawn attention to Dogecoin’s value as a network. In September, the commentator provided an interesting tidbit of research to his small, yet dedicated Twitter following. At the time, he lauded Dogecoin’s transactional throughput, which was 3x that of Bitcoin Cash, 8x Litecoin, 13x Dash, 35x Decred, and 41x Bitcoin Gold.

Speaking on these statistics, which were eye-opening, to say the least, Rooke wrote:

Dogecoin may have started as a joke, but their community is now the envy of the crypto world.

Shibes Rejoice!

Dogecoin”HODLers” have had other reasons to be bullish as well. As reported by Ethereum World News previously, as of late-October, users of the popular Salt Lending platform will be able to put up their DOGE as collateral for loans. Elaborating on this exciting subject matter, Salt Lending, or SALT for short, issued a Medium post to highlight what this move entails.

Per the post, Dogecoin will now be a collateral option alongside BTC, ETH, and LTC. By putting up any of the four aforementioned crypto assets, qualified users of the platform can “leverage their digital assets” to gain access to U.S. dollar loans. It is important to note that SALT allows users of its platform to put up a combination of the four assets as collateral, which allows for a solid range of flexibility.

Issuing a comment on why it added the asset, the fintech startup noted:

Dogecoin has a rich history and incredible support from its community, is widely traded, offers high liquidity, and is built using the Bitcoin code base — all factors that make it not only a viable asset to loan against, but an obvious collateral choice for SALT.

At the time of writing, amid a market recovery, DOGE has posted a mere 1.4% gain, which follows a 20% day seen on Monday. The asset is currently valued at $0.002591 a piece, still ~87% down from its all-time high at just shy of $0.02.

Shiba Inu Title Image Courtesy of Christal Yuen on Unsplash