Original author: b12ny (X: @b66ny )
It has always been regarded by the market as the leader of meme coins. At the end of 2024, its price soared due to the Trump and Musk effect during the US election, but then entered a sharp correction and the decline once exceeded 60%. This is consistent with the overall decline of the meme coin sector, indicating that its short-term momentum is dominated by market sentiment.
In terms of institutional layout, Grayscale launched the Dogecoin Trust Fund (management fee of 2.5%) in January 2025. The trust is limited to qualified investors. Although the scale is still small (nearly US$2 million AUM), its significance goes beyond the number itself. It represents that $Doge has officially entered the range of institutional investable assets. It is also regarded as a key step in Dogecoins transformation from meme-oriented to institutional investment.
The ETF is promoted by Bitwise, which submitted the $Doge ETF application to the SEC. If it is approved, it may further expand its market liquidity. However, there are no approved cases yet, and future development still needs to observe changes in the regulatory environment.
$Doge has the potential for short-term speculative value and long-term application scenarios, and its price has been highly correlated with Musk in the long run. X is actively exploring the integration of the payment system. If $Doge is included in the X payment system, this will be the biggest market catalyst since 2021.
The future development direction will depend on three key variables: payment applications, institutional investment and chip movements.
Currently, $Doge is still a speculative asset driven by the community. If X or Tesla expands its payment application, it may bring new market demand. In addition, the progress of ETF applications and regulatory policies will also affect the inflow of institutional funds and further change the market structure of DOGE. This article will evaluate the current positioning and future potential opportunities of $Doge through historical review, narrative economics and in-depth analysis of chip structure.
Historical Overview
$Doge was created in 2013 by Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer to satirize the bubble in the cryptocurrency market, but it unexpectedly developed into the worlds largest meme coin by market value. The historical development of $Doge can be divided into several major stages:
2013 - 2017: Community Driven and Charity Culture
The Reddit community promotes $Doge as an online reward currency.
In 2014, it sponsored the Jamaican bobsleigh team to participate in the Winter Olympics.
In 2015, Elon Musk first publicly expressed interest in $Doge.
2018 - 2020: Low liquidity and market marginalization
$Doge has maintained a low price for a long time, with no obvious narrative driving the market.
The main liquidity comes from social trading and has not received much attention from institutions.
2021-2022: Elon Musk and the memecoin wave
The GME incident and Musk’s post boosted $Doge, which rose 100 times in 4 months.
$Doge’s market value once exceeded $90 billion, making it one of the top three cryptocurrencies.
Robinhood, Coinbase, Binance, and OKX mainstream trading platforms have listed $Doge.
2023 - 2025: Institutional capital entry and payment process
Elon Musks acquisition of Twitter (now X) sentiment drives $Doge up.
Tesla starts accepting $Doge as payment for some products.
Trump was elected as the US President, and his attitude has changed to be cryptocurrency-friendly and may promote related policies.
X Money code and related information are circulated, and the market expects that it may support encrypted payments as $Doge.
Grayscale launches $Doge Trust Fund, Bitwise submits $Doge ETF application.
Narrative Economy
The market value of $Doge is mainly driven by narratives, which determine the future development and liquidity sources of $Doge, and also affect the capital rotation patterns of institutions and retail investors.
Here are the narratives impacting the market right now:
Memecoin leaders and POW mechanism Musk effect and $Doge connection Payment narrative (Tesla, X Money) Institutional investment and ETF application
Memecoin faucet and POW mechanism
Memecoin leader
Since the birth of $Doge, it was mainly promoted by the Reddit community to become an online reward function. Since the last round of bull market, it has become the leader of the meme coin with the largest market value because of Musk. Although it is mainly affected by the overall market trend, it has long been correlated with other meme coins and catalyzed the birth of other meme coins.
For example, $Shib and $Floki were born in 2021, and $Babydoge was the most popular at the time. It is worth mentioning that compared with other compatible/existing meme tokens on the public chain, $Doge is the POW meme coin with the largest market value (second only to $BTC), and $LTC is third.
POW Mechanism
In the last round, we often heard the phrase Bitcoin gold, Litecoin silver, Doge copper because their technical architectures are all POW and their codes are similar. The biggest difference between $Doge and them comes from the inflation mechanism. 5 billion pieces are issued every year. The other two have a maximum supply cap. The table below compares the information and mechanisms of the three:
In early 2014, when the computing power of $Ltc was as high as 600G H/s, $Doge was less than 40G H/s, which resulted in a low cost of network attack on DOGE. It was attacked by mining pools and Dogecoin Wallet was hacked, and the price quickly collapsed by 95.26%. In order to enhance security, LTC founder Charles Lee suggested that the $Doge community conduct joint mining (AuxPoW) with $Ltc. This suggestion caused heated debate, and finally the community chose to bind with $Ltc.
Through shared computing power, the computing power of $Doges entire network continues to grow, which increases the cost of hackers attacking DOGE and ensures the security of the chain. In addition, the $Doge income obtained by miners has become their main source of income (early $Ltc miners were also large holders of $Doge). Looking back, the joint mining at that time did bring a win-win situation.
The Musk Effect and the Correlation of $Doge
Everyone knows that $Doge will be hyped again in 2021, and the biggest driving force behind it is Musk. As time goes by, the market influence of $Doge and its connection with Musk have gradually expanded, including Musk’s announcement on April 28, 2021 that he will appear on Saturday Night Live (SNL) and broadcast live on May 8.
When asked during the live broadcast what $Doge is, he responded with a smile: Its a hustle (Its a scam). The price plummeted 30% from $0.74. At that time, Barry Silbert, head of Grayscale, even posted a message saying that he shorted $Doge for $1 million on FTX. As a result of karma, $Doge has now become one of the currencies of the Grayscale Trust Fund, and an obvious change in attitude can also be seen.
Musk also strongly supports Trumps administration in this election. Last year, he even proposed a government efficiency department (abbreviated as DOGE) to be responsible for improving government efficiency and reducing costs. In the early stages of the market, this move was tied to the price of $Doge. In early January this year, the official website was briefly changed to the $Doge logo.
However, looking back from the past to the present, we can find that the overall environment has changed. The market no longer buys Musks simple slogans, memes or tweets, and places its expectations for rising on Musks ability to further support $Doge in other ways.
Payments narrative (Tesla, X Money)
In 2025, X announced that it will launch the payment service X Money. This is a key step for Musk to make X an all-in-one program. According to the information currently available, it already has digital wallets, instant transfers, QR code payments, and Visa functions. It is expected that a more deeply integrated system may be released in the future.
However, as a trader in Crypto, I am more concerned about whether the expected combination of X Money and $Doge can be realized, plus the existing Tesla payment methods include $Doge (only for some products), and some news media pointed out that some super charging stations in the United States also support charging payments.
The following is an interpretation based on the information I currently have:
Tesla
According to @inevitable 360, the DOGECOIN code can be found on the cybertruck page by querying the front-end code. During the period of 2022-2023, I personally found related codes such as DOGEPAY and DOGECOIN by querying the front-end code. Later, Musk announced the official opening of the payment function. Therefore, based on this information and the payment narrative, it is very likely that the option of supporting payment for purchasing vehicles will be realized this year.
X Money
According to the information released by @aaronp 613, X is expected to launch X money in the United States first. Since X Money has not yet obtained full approval from all 50 states in the United States, it may choose to go online first in the 39 states that have been approved, and through testing and verification in some states, each user will also be provided with a QR code, which can be used to transfer money and remittances to each other, similar to scanning code payment.
Based on my past research experience and interpretation, in April 2023, Musk changed the bluebird logo to the $Doge dog logo in order to fulfill his promise in 2022. Just like the DOGE briefly changed its official website logo to a dog as mentioned earlier, I think Musk will keep his original promise or it is a joke (the same goes for the acquisition of Twitter).
On a practical level, assuming that X Money officially supports financial services, X can test the feasibility of payment services and then optimize and expand them based on market reactions. Regulation will become a topic of speculation. Whether X Money can overcome regulatory obstacles may also become the focus of the market, attracting capital speculation in $Doge, which is one of the universal methods for cross-border payments.
The most well-known of these was in 2022, when Vladimir Tenev, CEO of Robinhood, the largest $Doge holding address, wrote: If Dogecoin wants to become an asset for daily payments and transactions in the future, the problem of low transaction throughput can be solved by increasing block size and reducing block time. Dogecoin co-founder and Musk also expressed support for his views.
Tenev first mentioned that Dogecoins transaction fees are already small enough to be a viable electronic cash leader, but he believes that if Dogecoin is to be adopted more widely, the block size and block time of Dogecoin are the main points that need to be improved. Therefore, if the speed problem can be further reduced (I believe that Musk wants to do it, which is absolutely no problem), and now that Tesla has implemented the $Doge payment method, then the scenario of cooperating with the X Money payment application may be greatly expanded to the world.
Institutional Investment and ETF Application
Institutional Investment
In addition to Grayscales launch of the Dogecoin Trust Fund (nearly $2 million AUM) this year, which is seen as a key step in $Doges transformation from meme-oriented to institutional investment, the Dogecoin Foundation is also a core role dedicated to promoting and supporting the development of Dogecoin.
The foundation also announced the establishment of a core development fund in early 2023, investing $5 million Doge (about $360,000) to support the work of Dogecoin core developers. In November 2024, the foundation issued a fundraising appeal, seeking support from large sponsors to promote the large-scale adoption of Dogecoin in 2025. The funds will be used to build a decentralized payment infrastructure called Dogebox to assist small and medium-sized enterprises in accepting Dogecoin as a payment method.
In addition, it is also worth paying attention to the members of the foundation. The foundation was reorganized in 2021, and the members of the advisory board include: Dogecoin co-founder Billy Markus, core developer Max Keller, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, and Musks long-term partner Jared Birchall. These people are well-known and influential celebrities.
ETF Application
In early February, Bloomberg analysts James Seyffart and Eric Balchunas predicted the approval probability of the four major cryptocurrency ETFs, $Sol, $Doge, $Ltc and $Xrp:
$Doge (75%): As the largest meme coin, the 19 b-4 filings submitted by Grayscale and Bitwise have been approved by the SEC, so the chances of approval are higher.
The institutional part is that Trumps policies and speeches tend to reduce regulation and encourage market development, which also increases the chances of approval for $Doge ETF. Therefore, the real question is not whether it will pass, but when it will pass.
Personally, I think it must be passed at least before the end of this year, so that the positive effects of the ETF narrative will not decrease with the marginal effect. At present, there are more and more currency ETFs that may be applied for and submitted. It must be passed before the end of the year, so that the markets expectations for prices will increase (from the perspective of liquidity and quantity).
Assuming that $Doge, the leading meme coin, is approved as scheduled, its status and probability as a legal payment may be greatly improved. In other words, whether Trumps Crypto policy will be truly promoted will also have a key impact on Musks development of $Doge payment and financial markets.
Chip structure
Since $Doge chips are concentrated in a few addresses, the top 115 holders account for 65.4% of the total circulation, and even Robinhood alone holds 21.06% of the chips. Therefore, in-depth analysis of the impact of these chips on price fluctuations can usually reveal clues before the market starts and ends, which is also very helpful based on past personal trading experience. The following table is a comparison of the Top 20 and Robinhood holdings compiled by me in the past:
According to the article Beyond Musk: The Real Price Pusher of Dogecoin?! See the Chip Allocation and Price Impact at a Glance! Quickly Grasp the Key Signals Before the Price Surge, the top 20 holders of $Doge, especially the on-chain transfer behavior of smart money addresses, can be found that the operation timing of these addresses holding large amounts of $Doge is highly correlated with price fluctuations. The following table shows the addresses with high correlation with prices in the article statistics:
The address transfer behavior can be used as a reference to assist in trading planning, such as buying at low points and selling at high points. The selling pressure caused by large-scale transfers often becomes a reference signal for the short-term market trend. For traders, paying attention to the movements of these addresses can provide analysis and evaluation of future price trends. However, its market behavior shows that the participation of large amounts of smart money makes its chip dynamics more complicated.
$Doge’s current position and future potential opportunities
Judging from past prices and cycles, it is very likely that a relative low point will be formed at 0.18 to 0.2 and then break through the historical high again. I have also expressed my willingness to buy in large amounts at 0.18 in a previous tweet. If you want me to give a price prediction, I think the probability of reaching $1 in this cycle is the highest, just like the historical significance of 100,000 to $Btc.
At this stage, $Doge still relies on market narratives and capital liquidity. In the short to medium term, it may continue to maintain high volatility following the overall market. Assuming that key events such as X Money and ETF approval are achieved as expected, it may truly transform from a meme coin to a payment-based cryptocurrency.
See you on the moon.
