With a market value of about $15 billion, Dogecoin is one of the largest cryptocurrencies. In autumn 2025 the first US funds holding DOGE came to market, and a listed company announced it wanted to buy up to 5 percent of all dogecoins.
Anyone looking at a blockchain of that size assumes it is heavily used and well protected. Both can be counted: how many people actually pay with Dogecoin, who produces the blocks, and who pays for them.
Dogecoin is a Bitcoin offshoot that began as a joke
Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer launched Dogecoin in December 2013 as a parody of the crypto hype, with the Shiba Inu dog from an internet meme as its logo. Technically Dogecoin builds on Litecoin's code, which in turn descends from Bitcoin. There are no smart contracts and no DeFi. At its core Dogecoin does one thing: send coins from one address to another.
Two things set it apart from Bitcoin. A block arrives every minute, and every block creates 10,000 new DOGE, with no cap and no halving. On 30 September 2026 about 156 billion DOGE were in circulation. Each year about 5 billion more are added, 3.2 percent.
Bitcoin gets scarcer. Dogecoin grows by the same amount every year.
What are the coins used for?
The chain is barely used
According to Blockchair, 19,555 transactions ran over Dogecoin in the 24 hours to 30 September. In August the average was 29,951 a day. That is the level of 2021.
There were spikes in between: 1.18 million transactions a day in June 2023, 1.66 million in February 2024. They came with waves of so-called inscriptions, where data such as images or tokens is written directly into transactions. They had little to do with payments, and they have gone again.
All users together paid $790 in fees over those 24 hours. The median fee was just over one cent.
The payment channels many were waiting for do not exist, or only at the margin. Musk's payment service X Money launched in spring 2026 with dollars and Visa, without cryptocurrency. Tesla has accepted DOGE in its own merchandise shop since 2022, never for cars.
Dogecoin is big on the exchanges. On its own chain little happens.
If users pay so little, who pays the miners who protect the chain?
Holders pay for the security, and it is borrowed
Since 2014 Dogecoin has been mined together with Litecoin. Both use the same algorithm, and a miner can find blocks for both chains with the same computing power. This is called merged mining. According to Blockchair, about three quarters of Litecoin's computing power mines Dogecoin alongside it today.
Who pays whom shows in the block rewards of the last 24 hours:
| new coins to miners, in dollars | fees from all users | transactions | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dogecoin | $1.33m | $790 | 19,555 |
| Litecoin | $0.24m | $546 | 167,184 |
Miners earn more than five times as much from Dogecoin as from Litecoin. Dogecoin is seen as Litecoin's tag-along. Yet most of the shared computing power is paid for by Dogecoin, almost entirely with new coins: fees make up 0.06 percent of the income.
Holders pay for those new coins through dilution. Per year, security costs Dogecoin about 3.2 percent of its market value. For Bitcoin it is 0.84 percent.
The computing power this buys sits in few hands. According to miningboard, three pools found three quarters of Dogecoin's blocks on 30 September:
| Pool | Share |
|---|---|
| F2Pool | 32.3 % |
| ViaBTC | 24.5 % |
| AntPool | 17.8 % |
| together | 74.6 % |
F2Pool and ViaBTC together reach 56.8 percent. Two companies acting together could produce the majority of blocks. That they do is not documented. That they could is.
Dogecoin pays the most for a security it borrows from Litecoin.
Has that security ever been tested?
The 2026 test shows how large the borrowed protection is
In 2025 the Qubic project briefly took over more than a quarter of Monero's computing power and rewrote the chain by 18 blocks. On 1 April 2026 it announced it would replace Monero entirely with Dogecoin.
The result can be read on Qubic's own dashboard. From April to June 2026 Qubic found 227 Dogecoin blocks, 0.18 percent of all blocks in that period. The last block it found dates from 30 June. On 30 September the dashboard showed zero computing power.
On Monero, rented computing power was enough to intervene. On Dogecoin the same attempt stayed below one in five hundred blocks, because it had to compete with Litecoin's industrial miners.
The borrowed security is expensive, but it holds: an outside attacker struggles against the Litecoin miners.
What does all this mean for the price?
The price rests on a few months and moves with Bitcoin, leveraged
Monthly returns in US dollars from Binance monthly candles, July 2019 to August 2026:
| Jul 2019 to Aug 2026 | since Jan 2023 | |
|---|---|---|
| Months | 86 | 44 |
| Correlation of monthly returns with BTC | 0.23 | 0.72 |
| Months in which BTC fell | 40 | 17 |
| … of which DOGE itself fell | 36 | 15 |
| … median in those months DOGE / BTC | −17.2 / −8.8 % | −18.1 / −7.1 % |
| Return DOGE / BTC | +1,771 / +605 % | +18 / +375 % |
| DOGE without its best month | +136 % | −55 % |
| DOGE without its two best months | −62 % | −76 % |
Since its Binance listing Dogecoin has beaten Bitcoin, but only because of two months: January 2021 at +692 percent and April 2021 at +527 percent. Without them DOGE would stand at −62 percent. Since 2023 DOGE has trailed far behind Bitcoin, and without November 2024 (+161 percent) it would be in the red.
When Bitcoin falls, Dogecoin almost always falls with it, about twice as far. Since 2023 it has moved about 1.6 times as much as Bitcoin month by month.
| Year | DOGE | BTC |
|---|---|---|
| 2019 (from July) | −55.2 % | −35.4 % |
| 2020 | +135.1 % | +301.9 % |
| 2021 | +3,546 % | +59.8 % |
| 2022 | −58.7 % | −64.2 % |
| 2023 | +27.4 % | +155.6 % |
| 2024 | +252.9 % | +121.3 % |
| 2025 | −62.8 % | −6.3 % |
| 2026 (to Aug) | −29.5 % | −10.3 % |
The all-time high on a closing basis was $0.6898 on 7 May 2021. On 29 September 2026 DOGE closed at $0.0939, 86 percent below it.
Anyone holding Dogecoin since 2019 owes their gain to two months in 2021.
Claims about Dogecoin, checked
| Claim | Who, when | What the data says | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| More than 1.2 million transactions a day | Coin-Turk, 2 Sep 2026 | Blockchair August/September 2026: 19,000 to 37,000 a day | does not hold |
| The ten largest addresses hold over 60 % | capital.com, 19 Nov 2025 | Blockchair 30 Sep 2026: 44.5 % | does not hold |
| Dogecoin becomes a payment method on X | expected since the Twitter purchase in 2022 | X Money launched in 2026 without cryptocurrency | not documented |
| Tesla accepts DOGE | Tesla, 14 Jan 2022 | for merchandise, never for cars | partly holds |
| "Official Dogecoin Treasury" aiming for 5 % of all DOGE | CleanCore, September 2025 | 533m DOGE on 31 Mar 2026, 0.34 %; sold 200m DOGE at a $29.4m loss in Q1 (10-Q) | does not hold |
| Funds bring institutional money | fund launches 09/2025 to 01/2026 | all US funds together at most about $24m, less than 18 days of new issuance; Bitwise is closing its fund (last trading day 14 Oct 2026) | does not hold |
| Qubic takes over Dogecoin mining | Qubic, 1 Apr 2026 | 0.18 % of blocks April to June, none since 30 June | does not hold |
| The largest address belongs to Robinhood | label on BitInfoCharts | 17.4 % of all DOGE; Robinhood has not confirmed it | cannot be checked |
The pattern: the big numbers about Dogecoin are usually too big. The funds, the treasury and the transactions stay far below what was announced or claimed.
The obvious objection
"Dogecoin is not about technology. It is a meme, and memes live on attention."
True, and the price data backs it: two months of attention carry the entire return since 2019. But the chain pays its bill in months without attention too. Every day about 13.7 million new DOGE are added, about $1.3 million at the 30 September price. A meme needs attention. Dogecoin also needs $1.3 million of new buyers every day.
What this means for you
If you see DOGE as a means of payment: there is little paying on the chain, and the big payment channels never came.
If you see DOGE as a scarce asset like Bitcoin: it is not. Supply grows by 5 billion every year, and you carry that dilution so the chain stays secure.
If you see DOGE as a bet on the next big month: that describes its price history most honestly. Then it belongs in a position size you can afford to lose.
Holding Dogecoin means paying for the security of a chain that hardly anyone uses.
Three numbers show whether that changes: transactions per day outside inscription waves, the fee share of miner income (0.06 percent today) and the share of the two largest pools (56.8 percent today). What remains open is whether Dogecoin will ever be used enough for its users to help pay for its security.
FAQ
Why is Dogecoin mined together with Litecoin? Both use the Scrypt algorithm. Since 2014 Dogecoin has accepted blocks produced as a by-product of Litecoin mining. That gave Dogecoin more computing power than it could have attracted alone.
How is the yearly cost of security calculated? New coins of the last 24 hours in dollars according to Blockchair, times 365, divided by market value. For Dogecoin that is $1.33m × 365 ÷ $15.1bn, for Bitcoin $39.0m × 365 ÷ $1,694bn. Fees are small on both chains and not included.
How are the monthly returns calculated? Month-end close against the previous month-end close, DOGE and BTC each against USDT on Binance, without fees, from the listing on 5 July 2019. September 2026 is still running and is left out.
All DOGE monthly returns in US dollars
| Year | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | −36.3 | −14.2 | −3.2 | 8.6 | −11.2 | −12.2 | ||||||
| 2020 | 18.1 | −6.8 | −18.7 | 35.2 | 5.7 | −9.0 | 39.6 | −0.4 | −17.8 | −2.6 | 38.7 | 31.2 |
| 2021 | 692.0 | 30.3 | 11.7 | 527.4 | −3.5 | −22.0 | −18.2 | 33.9 | −26.6 | 37.1 | −23.3 | −20.7 |
| 2022 | −16.9 | −5.7 | 3.5 | −7.7 | −32.5 | −22.7 | 2.5 | −9.9 | 0.5 | 105.7 | −15.8 | −34.2 |
| 2023 | 36.8 | −15.9 | −4.8 | 3.3 | −9.9 | −7.2 | 17.2 | −18.1 | −2.7 | 10.0 | 22.2 | 7.3 |
| 2024 | −12.1 | 49.0 | 87.5 | −39.4 | 19.2 | −21.7 | −2.1 | −16.9 | 12.8 | 41.5 | 160.8 | −25.0 |
| 2025 | 4.1 | −38.6 | −17.4 | 3.3 | 11.8 | −14.2 | 27.0 | 1.9 | 9.0 | −20.0 | −21.7 | −19.5 |
| 2026 | −11.2 | −9.8 | −1.8 | 15.4 | −5.7 | −28.2 | −3.4 | 19.0 |
Figures in percent. July 2019 from the listing on 5 July.
Not investment advice, not a recommendation, not a forecast — historical patterns are no guarantee.
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