“My biggest takeaway is that people are crazy,” says Billy Markus, the co-creator of the “sh*tcoin” that has a $14 billion market cap.

Dogecoin, the widely adopted satirical digital currency, turned ten years old on Wednesday.

The “open-source peer-to-peer digital currency, favoured by Shiba Inus worldwide,” as declared on its website, is the longest-standing, meme-fueled cryptocurrency and currently has a market capitalization of more than $14 billion. 

Billy Markus, co-creator of the token who goes by Shibetoshi Nakamoto on X, wrote on X this morning, “10 years ago I saw a funny tweet about the idea of dogecoin and I decided to make it in a few hours, then a bunch of weird things happened and now the currency is worth 14 billion dollars for some reason.” 

here’s what the alpha version of dogecoin looked like 10 years ago https://t.co/AMQecoPtvu

— Shibetoshi Nakamoto (@BillyM2k) December 6, 2023

For example, in 2014, before Ethereum went live, the Dogecoin community had donated roughly $30,000 worth of dogecoins to the Jamaican bobsled team as a means for the athletes to attend the Sochi Olympics. 

In 2019, Elon Musk, the billionaire juggling rockets and electric cars, wrote “Doge might be my fav cryptocurrency,” on X, the social media platform he now owns, formerly known as Twitter. At the time, DOGE was exchanging hands at less than a cent. Two years later, Dogecoin would reach an all-time high of 73 cents and Musk would be on Saturday Night Live, delivering jokes about the token. 

Still Going Strong

Dogecoin has declined since its peak but is still worth almost 10 cents currently, with a 24-hour trading volume of $3.5 billion, data from CoinGecko shows. It was reported that DOGE’s notional open interest currently stands at about $625 million, almost a 60% increase in the past week. 

What started as a satirical cryptocurrency, “designed to die in about a year,” according to Markus, has proliferated virally and transformed into a financial instrument with serious liquidity. When people ask him what he learned by creating dogecoin, Markus wrote, “My biggest takeaway is that people are crazy.” 

Alex Thorn and Karim Helmy wrote in a 2021 research paper, “​​DOGE is likely to live on as long as Bitcoin lives, and as long as jokes are funny. It is perhaps the purest ‘gallows humor’ investment vehicle ever created, mocking a frothy market with its playful indifference.”

Jackson Palmer, Dogecoin’s other co-creator, did not respond immediately to a request for comment.