A diligent redditor has pointed out that there are more Dogecoin (soft ‘g’) transactions than all other cryptocoins combined. At the time of writing, Bitcoin, Litecoin–gaining attention as Bitcoin’s cheap alternative –Peercoin, and six of the most popular crypocurrencies (there are more than 70) average 3,061 transactions per hour, while Dogecoin trades an hourly average of 3,894. That’s more than 93,000 per day.

For the uninitiated, Doge is a dog meme that you had better read up on here. The currency standard was built by a programmer out of Portland and marketing specialist out of Sydney immortalizing the insightful Shiba Inu dog, below, which has become the patron saint of the Doge meme.





Dogecoin didn’t even exist before this past December. On December 8, its first day of trading, there were nearly 5,000 unique Dogecoin transactions, which was less than 10 percent of Bitcoin. Dogecoin surpassed Bitcoin trading on December 16, and by December 20, Dogecoin peaked just shy of 200,000 transactions, a weeklong increase of 935 percent.

To those now considering following the doge: The market value is probably not what you’re looking for. The latest Dogecoins were traded at about $0.00030, a tiny fraction of Bitcoin’s $821 valuation.

Confusingly, there are about 5,000,000,000 more Dogecoins being traded than there are Dogecoins in circulation, and mining will cap at 100,000,000,000. Its market popularity was legitimized right around Christmas, when hackers took off with 21 million coins from the Dogewallet. There’s a subreddit for trading and news, another for policing scams. There’s a Dogecoin Foundation to promote the use of the cryptocurrency, the actual practicality of which has been seen as dubious by economists.

So how come you haven’t heard of it? Carl Miller, writing for Wired, says there will be many more cryptocurrencies coming soon to crowd out Bitcoin:

I confidently predict that the number of cryptocurrencies that are regularly traded and used will radically grow. Their exchange with each other is also likely to grow more intensive and seamless. We might end up habitually using dozens of currencies without noticing, as super-fast transactions allow us to move our money into the currency we need at that time. You might quickly exchange the sexcoins you have left over from last night into bitcoins to pay your freelance designer, devcoins to make a contribution to her open-source project, and a childcoin so your kid can browse amazon whilst they wait.

For as little as people understand the system, it might be time to take this meme’s power more seriously. For more on the history of Dogecoin, check out this writeup from DailyTech.