In 2013, Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer developed the cryptocurrency Dogecoin as a parody of Bitcoin. Of course, they never expected then that DOGE would become the favourite cryptocurrency of Elon Musk and many other influencers, being worth almost 0.50 cents on the dollar.
Doge Barking at the Moon pic.twitter.com/QFB81D7zOL
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 15, 2021
Billy Markus, thus Dogecoin was born
In a recent interview with Business Insider, Billy Marcus, who at the time was an engineer at IBM, explained how it all started as a joke:
“I found that there was a huge market with new coins coming out daily, and at times hourly, all touting how they were going to become worth zillions and take over the galaxy. I thought it was silly, and also thought that, considering there were so many coming out, it was probably easy to make.”
Of course, almost 10 years have passed since then, and Dogecoin has found its way, making Tesla’s own CEO fall in love with it, who, perhaps somewhat out of amusement, started supporting DOGE in several of his tweet posts a few months ago, causing its price to skyrocket (perhaps to Mars?).
Billy Marcus also explained:
“The original intent was a parody of all the ‘serious’ clone coins that were trying so hard to differentiate themselves, but all seemed the same. Dogecoin was just another clone coin, but instead of taking itself seriously, it was just Dogecoin”.
The popularity of Dogecoin has caught the attention of many, so much so that it is now increasingly accepted as a payment method: for example, the airline Air Baltic recently decided to add DOGE, and 1800 ATMs around the world have also started to support the crypto.
Dogecoin on Robinhood
A few days ago, recording as much as +468% in one week and 6,000% since the beginning of the year with a market capitalization of more than $48 billion, Dogecoin had actually caused problems to the trading app Robinhood, which later reported that it had fixed the technical problems in a couple of hours
Robinhood had explained:
“As one of the few platforms where customers can buy Dogecoin, our platform is right at the heart of this surge”.
The post Dogecoin, Billy Marcus and the crypto born as a joke appeared first on The Cryptonomist.
