Toby Moore: The death of crypto may be premature

Is crypto dead?

If cryptocurrency is dead, somebody forgot to tell the dog.

Dogecoin isn’t the whole crypto story. But it may be the strangest place to start.

Headlines this summer say a Dogecoin-funded satellite will launch toward the moon on Sept. 14. The actual moon. Earth’s moon.

There is a catch with that date. First, how did an internet joke end up with a ride to the moon?

In December 2013, IBM engineer Billy Markus and Adobe marketer Jackson Palmer created Dogecoin as a joke about the cryptocurrency boom. They borrowed a popular internet image of a Shiba Inu dog. It was not an Elon Musk project. It was two people poking fun at a financial movement.

And then ... people started using it.

An online community formed, tipping strangers for good posts and organizing charity drives. In January 2014, Dogecoin users raised tens of thousands of dollars to help send the Jamaican bobsled team to the Sochi Winter Olympics. Two months later, they funded clean-water projects in Kenya.

Musk began tweeting about the coin in 2019. By the spring of 2021, his enthusiasm had helped turn it into a buying frenzy. Dogecoin climbed from under a penny at the start of that year to about 73 cents on May 8, the day Musk hosted “Saturday Night Live.”