On December 6, 2013, Dogecoin was officially launched. Australian marketer Jackson Palmer had registered Dogecoin.com as a joke a few weeks earlier, after tweeting about combining two of the internet’s biggest things: cryptocurrency and the Doge meme. Portland-based programmer Billy Markus saw the tweet, reached out, and forked the existing Litecoin code over a single weekend to create the actual coin.
The launch was deliberately silly. The logo featured Kabosu the Shiba Inu surrounded by Comic Sans text. The supply was uncapped — eventually 100 billion coins, then unlimited. There was no whitepaper, no roadmap, no business plan. And yet within two weeks, Dogecoin had a Reddit community of tens of thousands and a market cap reaching $8 million. The joke had become real.
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