Dogecoin was created December 6, 2013, by a pair of software engineers as a joke.

Billy Markus, an IBM programmer from Portland, Oregon, set to differentiate his crypto
from bitcoin, which was steeped in mystery with an anonymous creator and at the time
attracted a small, niche group of miners. Markus wanted his cryptocurrency to be open
to the masses, according to Chohan.

Markus looked for help making his weird dream a reality and found Jackson Palmer,
who worked for Adobe (ADBE). Palmer purchased the domain dogecoin.com — a nod
to the "doge" meme that was all over the internet at the time.

The website nods to its joke origins at the very top: Its Shiba Inu mascot is the first
image on the page, mimicking the meme that inspired it, which features the same dog
surrounded by a bunch of Comic Sans text in broken English.

On dogecoin.com, its mascot is captioned: "Dogecoin is an open source peer-to-peer
digital currency, favored by Shiba Inus worldwide."