Vitalik Buterin, Elon Musk Rep, Billy Markus help recreate the dormant Dogecoin Foundation
The leading memecoin is getting a new leash on life.
Dogecoin started 2021 worth well under one penny, where it had languished since IBM software developer Billy Markus and Adobe engineer Jackson Palmer created it in late 2013 as a way to satirize the hype around cryptocurrencies. It was designed to be as ridiculous as possible, with a grammatically challenged, Comic Sans-loving Shiba Inu dog meme as its face and 100 billion tokens created at launch.
The new Foundation board consists of five current Dogecoin developers and community veterans — Gary Lachance, Jens Wiechers, Michi Lumin, Ross Nicoll, and Timothy Stebbing — but it is the advisory board that really raised eyebrows.
That would be Tesla and Space-X founder Elon Musk — well, his representative and financial advisor Jared Birchall anyway.
Many Utility! Much Wow!
Specifically, that means accelerating the development efforts by establishing a paid team of core developers and launching a series of projects to add utility to what it calls the broader Dogecoin ecosystem.
These will “complement the current Core Wallet to enable faster integration and easier APIs for Financial, Social and Charitable projects wishing to use Dogecoin,” the group said. “We believe that the success of Dogecoin is through broad global adoption and utility, and intend to focus on projects that increase Dogecoin uptake at a grassroots level.”
To this end the Foundation also released a manifesto calling Dogecoin “the accidental crypto-
movement that makes people smile.”
It announces four project values — being useful, personable, welcoming, and reliable — and reads, “We are developing a currency for the people, and we strive to do only good everyday.”