Parody cryptocurrency dogecoin now valued at more than $1bn

A CRYPTOCURRENCY that started as a parody named after an internet meme about a Shiba Inu dog now has a market value of more than $1.2bn (€99m).

After a long period of stagnation, dogecoin has increased in value more than fivefold in the last month as the interest in cryptocurrencies has exploded.

The rapid rise demonstrates the mania that has engulfed digital coins and has worried even dogecoin’s creator.

Jackson Palmer told Coindesk, a website that tracks cryptocurrency news and prices, that he had faith in the development team behind dogecoin’s technology, but that it “says a lot about the state of the cryptocurrency space in general that a currency with a dog on it which hasn’t released a software update in over two years has a $1bnplus market cap”.

He added that the fact that most conversations about cryptocurrencies in the media concern investment and the potential to make money “draws attention away from the underlying technology and goals this movement was based [on]”.

Dogecoin was created in 2013 and took its name from a meme based around pictures of Shiba Inu dogs with garbled captions that relay the animal’s supposed internal monologue.

It began as a way to poke fun at the growing hype surrounding cryptocurrency. Now it seems it has been swept up in the latest round of that very same hype.

“Dogecoin is an open source peer-to-peer digital currency, favoured by Shiba Inus worldwide,” the cryptocurrency’s official website states. The creators are listed as Mr Palmer, along with ‘Shibetoshi Nakamoto’, a play on the alias of the founder of bitcoin, who is known as Satoshi Nakamoto.

All of the developers who work on dogecoin’s technology are reportedly volunteers. One of the team, Max Keller, told Coindesk that it was “a little scary” to find himself working on software that powers a billion-dollar network.