The company adopted an internet meme as its logo

An internet currency inspired by a dog internet meme is now worth more than $1billion – and is well and truly off its lead.

Dogecoin, which was originally invented to mock the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, adopted an internet meme as it’s logo in 2013.

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The Shiba inu dog rose to fame after a meme of the breed went viral.

Now it is worth more $1.17billion (£862 million), an impressive feat seeing as the software has not been updated for the past two years.


The recent hysteria over Bitcoin has seen Dogecoin’s value increase by more than 400%.

Dogecoin has rocketed in value over the past week (Picture: coinmarketcap.com)

The Shiba inu meme quickly went viral

None of the staff who run it are full-time either, with workforce being made up of volunteers using their spare time to keep the joke running.



It was created in 2013 to mock the growing hype surrounding Bitcoin.

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It lists it’s creators as Mr Palmer and Shibetoshi Nakamoto – a play on the mysterious creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto.

On their website, Dogecoin state: ‘Dogecoin is an open source peer-to-peer digital currency, favoured by Shiba Inus worldwide.’

Despite its success, Dogecoin’s founder, Jackson Palmer, who left the team is not so sure that the success should be viewed as something positive.

‘The fact that most conversations happening in the media and between peers focus on the investment potential is worrying, as it draws attention away from the underlying technology and goals this movement was based [on],’ he told Coin Desk.

‘I have a lot of faith in the Dogecoin Core development team to keep the software stable and secure, but I think it says a lot about the state of the cryptocurrency space in general that a currency with a dog on it which hasn’t released a software update in over 2 years has a $1billion plus market cap.’