It might be Year of the Ox in China, but for the crypto world, it is the Year of the Dog. The Shiba Inu-based meme currency dogecoin has zoomed 13,000% since the start of the year and is showing no signs of stopping. Mint explores.
What is doge or dogecoin?
Dogecoin is a controversial cryptocurrency based on the popular “Doge” internet meme and features a Shiba Inu on its logo. Doge or dogecoin was created by Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer as a joke or a meme in comparison to bitcoin when there was a lot of hue and cry about digital assets in 2013. Just like bitcoin, dogecoin enables peer-to-peer transactions across a decentralized network. Thanks to the retail investor-fuelled frenzy, dogecoin hit its all-time` high of $0.73 earlier this month to become the fourth-biggest cryptocurrency in the world with a market capitalization of nearly $70 billion.
How do you mine dogecoin?
Mining cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, ether and dogecoin generally involves solving complex mathematical problems. Dogecoin uses an algorithm, Scrypt, for mining, which requires less power and is quicker than bitcoin’s algorithm, SHA-256. The mining difficulty of dogecoin is less than one millionth that of bitcoin’s mining difficulty, according to estimates. In mining, cryptocurrencies are awarded to individuals for solving complex equations. Since the reward for mining doge is higher, there are around 129.6 billion doges in circulation, against 18 million for bitcoin, at present.
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Why has its price zoomed since the start of the year?
Dogecoin came into the limelight after Tesla Inc. chief executive Elon Musk tweeted “It’s inevitable”, along with the picture of the meme cryptocurrency in July 2020. The major rally started in late January this year on speculative trading by retail investors after it got attention from users on the Reddit message board.
How do you buy and sell dogecoin?
A Supreme Court order in March 2020 quashed a Reserve Bank of India ban on cryptocurrency transactions. The government is reportedly planning a law banning private cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and dogecoin, but this has not been passed so far. Investors can buy or sell dogecoin at any exchange that offers the digital currency. They can also store it on an exchange or in a wallet. In India cryptocurrency exchanges such as WazirX, CoinSwitch Kuber, and CoinDCX allow trading in dogecoin.
What is dogecoin rival Shiba Inu coin?
Shiba Inu is a breed of hunting dog from Japan, and the coin that carries its name is nicknamed the “Dogecoin Killer”. Created in August 2020 by an unidentified person known as Ryoshi, Shiba Inu coin’s price is negligible at $0.000016 (as of 16 May), which allows investors to hold billions and even trillions of this coin. Today, there are around 400 trillion coins of this meme cryptocurrency in circulation. In India, it was recently traded on the CoinDCX and WazirX platforms.
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