Dogecoin co-creator Billy Markus spoke to Boardroom about the meme token’s progress and how the crypto industry is becoming unstoppable.
When Boardroom asked Dogecoin co-creator Billy Markus where he sees Dogecoin in the next five years, he simply said, “it’ll still be a dog on a coin.”
If you, for some reason. missed out on the cultural phenomenon of how Dogecoin got its start, let’s break it down real quick: Doge was born from a meme in 2013. Jackson Palmer, the other Dogecoin creator, started the project to mock the growing cryptocurrency industry back then — specifically, Bitcoin. Markus jumped in on Doge, and it has become everything but a laughing stock nearly a decade later.
“Jackson, my co-founder, drank a beer one day and thought it’d be amusing to buy dogecoin.com and make a website without a cryptocurrency,” Markus told Boardroom in an email interview. “I ran across the website randomly and thought it would be funny to make the actual Dogecoin. I threw it together in a few hours, and we launched it, and then it took off, and lots of crazy stuff happened since.”
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Markus developed Dogecoin’s design based on a meme of a Shiba Inu dog with the deliberate misspelling of the word dog as doge displayed on it. Similar to Bitcoin and Ethereum, Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency that runs on blockchain technology. The popular meme token’s current price is $0.143 per share, and Yahoo! Finance reports that some experts anticipate that price will rise to $1 per share by the end of Q2. There are roughly 132.6 billion Dogecoins in circulation today.
Regardless of the current price, Dogecoin is growing, and Markus even said it has been bizarre to see some of the biggest names in business and finance actively debate the crypto he helped create. Markus thinks cryptocurrencies are only as good as the strong communities that support them.
“Cryptocurrencies don’t die from the price going down, they die when people stop using them and talking about them,” he said. “As long as people still want to use it and care about it, it’ll live on.”
And while crypto prices took a big plunge at the start of the week, Markus finds comedic relief by pointing the finger at Bitcoin. (Seriously, give him a follow if you haven’t done so already.)
What’s next for Dogecoin? How will it stay relevant in the crypto world?
We asked Markus about that and more.
Boardroom: How can we find sustained growth with Doge, compared to up-and-down volatility?
Billy Markus: Sustained growth isn’t a thing in cryptocurrency unless you zoom out. The primary use case of all cryptocurrency, in terms of how people use it, is to gamble with it. It’s a free market, price discovery is still happening, but it has more or less been a history of repeated bubbles and pops in the 12 years it has existed.
Has Elon Musk been good or bad for Doge, and what were the effects of his appearance on SNL?
I think he’s put it on the radar of an immense amount of people. That could never be a bad thing. What people do with that information is up to them.
Mark Cuban has mentioned that Doge could be the best crypto for kids and is the strongest crypto in general. What are your thoughts on this?
Doge is an open-source protocol and associated distributed database of hash strings with a cute dog mascot. It can be whatever people make of it. Similar to pretty much every other cryptocurrency, including Bitcoin, in the free market, the value is whatever someone decides to buy it for, the utility is whatever someone wants to use it for. So if there’s an excited community of people wanting to buy it and use it, it can maintain relevance.
What’s stopping other people from making an even bigger Doge? What makes Doge stand out?
Nothing stops anyone from making anything in cryptocurrency. The only differentiation of any of this stuff is the community of people using it and working on it.
Side note: Baby Doge isn’t doing too badly this month with its coin’s price surging 99%.
Do you see the Doge price going back up soon? Why or why not?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ That question is asking me to predict the future purchasing habits of every single person on Earth. If I could predict that, I’d be the richest human on Earth .
What would you like to say to Doge supporters who continue to invest?
I would say exactly what I said in my open letter from the beginning of this year:
Again, I have no real say in this, and everyone has the right to value the coin in any way they wish. It is just my wish, as the original creator, that Dogecoin and the Dogecoin community can be a force for good. And I don’t mean that in some sanctimonious way where the only thing of value is giving to charity or directly helping others — anything that is amusing or fun has value as well. The fiat value of Dogecoin is quite literally whatever someone else is willing to pay for it at any point in time, and the intrinsic value is not something I will ever be able to define, so when I talk about value, I’m not talking about those things. I’m talking about “True Value,” which I’d define as the positive things Dogecoin brings to the world.
Pump and dumping, rampant greed, scamming, bad-faith actors, demanding from others, hype without research, taking advantage of others — those are all worthless. Worse than worthless, honestly, bringing more negativity to an already difficult world. As the creator, some have called me the “doge mother,” so I say this with that mask: When I see things like that — and I’ve seen plenty of it through the last seven years — I’m not mad, just disappointed. Joy, kindness, learning, giving, empathy, fun, community, inspiration, creativity, generosity, silliness, absurdity. These types of things are what make Dogecoin worthwhile to me. If the community embodies these things, that’s True Value.
Any other comments about Doge, crypto, or some forward-thinking statements?
I’m happy to see the cryptocurrency space add more utility beyond gambling on the price. More companies are accepting it than ever before for transactions, there’s a lot of tipping, there are economies being made on it, digital ownership of items that haven’t existed in a decentralized way before, and blockchain is being used to solve interesting problems. I think it will continue to grow as people are finding more innovative ways to use the underlying technology.
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