Dogecoin is a first-generation cryptocurrency that can be used to transfer value globally in a secure manner. Dogecoin features the “Shiba Inu” Dog as its symbol, a popular internet meme dog. The decision to choose “Shiba Inu” was to keep the project a joke among the popular cryptocurrencies. Like Bitcoin and Litecoin, the main purpose of developing this cryptocurrency was to keep peer-peer transactions in a censorship-resistant manner.
When Dogecoin was released in 2013, there were no smart contracts, staking, and all these features that are available today. Therefore the main purpose was to create a secure network for transactions globally. Like Bitcoin, Dogecoin has good security features and requires 51% of the network's hashing power to alter the state of the blockchain. The current Hashrate of 213.97 TH/s makes it difficult to hack the blockchain. Dogecoin has been created to have a 1 minute block time, a blockchain’s block time refers to the frequency in which a new “block” is added to the “chain” of transactions. Dogecoin has no limit, initially, it started with 100 billion coins but due to the 1-minute block time, all these coins were mined in 2015. At that time the developers decided to issue 5 billion coins, notably, Dogecoin now issues 5 billion coins every year. Dogecoin was founded by Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer in 2013. Markus worked as a software engineer for IBM and Palmer was a programmer in Adobe.
On December 6, 2013, the network went live. Notably, Dogecoin had a million+ visitors on the day of the launch. On December 19, 2013, Dogecoin had a huge price rise of around 300%, which made crypto investors worldwide interested in Dogecoin. But unfortunately, the rally was short-lived and lasted only for three days and after that, the coin traced back to 80%. Days after this the native wallet of Dogecoin, Dogewallet was hacked. The hacker went off with millions of Dogecoin. For any cryptocurrency, this would have been the end but the developers and community started a donation campaign called “SaveDogemas”, to revive its stolen coins. Miraculously all losses were covered in this initiative.
In 2015 Jackson Palmer co-founder of Dogecoin left the Doge community saying that the community has become “toxic” and similarly the founder Billy Markus left in 2017. Now Dogecoin is taken care of by 5 Main developers and several others while the CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk has shown considerable interest in Dogecoin and is responsible for various price surges that happened in the past few weeks. Elon has plans to improve the chain enabling smart contracts and other solutions on the network which is currently not present.