There are really a lot of altcoins out there today but how many of them are actually there for a good valid purpose? We can think of a few good ones with a solid purpose such as providing a blockchain-based service – ethereum & factom.

Will you be surprised if we state that ‘Dogecoin’ is actually one of the very first altcoins to have been developed with one solid purpose – to have no purpose at all?

It was certainly created out of a joke, mocking the users of bitcoin and other digital currencies, during late 2013. Then the whole joke suddenly appeared to be something serious.

It attracted so many avid users of digital currency and those who were not even aware of bitcoin. The one reason behind this was because of the ‘internet’.

To simply put, it went viral for a couple of months. There were images of the dog, Shiba Inu, the main logo of Dogecoin, all over the web used by troll commenters and other users as an image that made everything appear as a joke.

If that does not sound crazy enough, here are some numbers to amaze you. In January 2014, Dogecoin grew significantly with a lot of online communities supporting it. The capitalization of Dogecoins reached a mere USD 60 million by the end of January 2014. During this period, it was the second most traded digital currency just a few steps behind Bitcoin.

What came next? The viral effects cooled down and investors fled, bringing down the total capitalization of Dogecoins to USD 12.5 million by September 2015.

As of late June 2015, miners have passed mining the 100 billionth Dogecoin but its real use is coming to an age of doubt. Although some social media users and internet tipping websites utilize Dogecoins as a ‘tipping’ currency, its usage is rapidly declining as compared to its viral days of 2014.

Its use was however largely supported for successful donation campaigns such as sponsoring a driver at NASCAR (Josh Wise), Doge4Water (well building charity in Kenya), and 2014 Winter Olympics ($50,000 for the Jamaican Bobsled Team).







