What is Dogecoin? DOGE, inflation and technology explained

Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency with its own blockchain that launched at the end of 2013 as a joke about an internet meme and today ranks among the largest coins in the world. Its ticker is DOGE. Unlike Bitcoin, there is no supply cap: every new block brings a fixed 10,000 DOGE, which adds around 5 billion coins a year. On November 12 one Dogecoin costs about €0.06, its market value is a little over €9.3 billion, and DOGE ranks 12th according to CoinGecko.

This profile explains how the network works technically, who secures it, why the money supply grows without limit and what that means for investors when buying and storing the coin. Our own calculation shows how sharply Dogecoin's inflation has fallen since 2015 and why the gap to Bitcoin is widening anyway.

Dogecoin explained simply: a payment coin on its own blockchain

A cryptocurrency is digital money whose bookkeeping is not held by a bank but in a public register maintained jointly by many computers. That register is called a blockchain: a sequence of data blocks in which every transfer is recorded permanently and visible to everyone. Dogecoin has run such a blockchain itself since December 2013, which makes it a coin in its own right rather than a token on someone else's network.