Hello,
We closed 2025 with Mike from Talus Network on why blockchains need brains and hands to participate in an agentic economy. We kick off this year asking how a joke has survived twelve years in an industry that forgets everything in twelve days.
Belief is the true asset. What people believe in, they hold - and it tends to rally in price due to limited supply. Gold is what people are betting on these days. It is up 68% against the dollar in the past year, so anyone holding it is having a good time. Meme assets represent the other end of the belief-monetary value spectrum. They have nothing backing them but a high degree of holders believing in them. In turn, over time, they become money.
Don’t worry - we are not about to shill a cult to you.
We are, however, about to talk about Dogecoin. Crypto’s original meme asset. It was launched as a joke in late 2013 by Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer.
Timothy Stebbing, CTO of House of Doge and Director at the Dogecoin Foundation, joined me for the first episode of the year. In his spare time, he tells people to stay away from crypto as an investment. Instead of investing in Dogecoin, he wants you to spend it. Five billion new coins get minted every year. This mechanism was created as a joke to mock bitcoin maximalists. Turns out roughly 2% inflation is actually pretty good for something you want people to use as currency rather than hoard as digital gold.
But is that what holders are doing? It depends on who you ask. Dogecoin has historically been a retail participant’s preferred “entry-drug” to crypto. It used to be much cheaper. So, tossing less than $1 to get a large number of tokens would appeal to people. It has been exceedingly volatile when compared to its larger cousins - Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana. Most importantly, it is the only meme asset that has lived through multiple cycles and set a new market-cap high in each cycle. Bitcoin’s distant, amusing cousin somehow teaches retail about crypto better than most VC-backed tokens.
But Dogecoin is a meme that is building something productive. Companies with treasury strategies are buying in. The community now spans memecoin traders, open source developers, and institutional investors. When Metallica performs with a symphony orchestra, two kinds of crowds are in the audience. One full of fans in ripped jeans and Ride the Lightning shirts. The other in suits, the usual symphony crowd. But they were all going to see the same show. That is the Dogecoin community now. People who look different, speak different languages, come from different worlds. But something made them all show up.
Doge worked and perhaps outperformed many of its peers, probably because it set out without intending to. It is an idea that took its time and played out over a decade. Most crypto-native assets cannot make that claim. There is no legacy of sponsoring NASCAR drivers in the trenches of PumpFun today. Perhaps that is what will be needed for those assets to catch up with Doge. We don’t quite know. But here’s what’s evident: Doge has survived a decade, and it may survive another one. Tune in to our conversation with Timothy to understand the reasons why.
Trying to do only good every day,
Saurabh Deshpande
