In recent times, the cryptocurrency market has been growing at an incredible pace, and thus, the world is gradually adopting the new virtual currency market. Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency created by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, has had an unprecedented surge in the first quarter of 2021, having an increase of over 10,000 percent. This has brought the founders to the spotlight with many wondering what their net worths would be at a time when the coin has exploded in value.
The pair launched the cryptocurrency as a joke in late 2013 without having a master plan for it. Surprisingly, Dogecoin has emerged as one of the big names in the crypto world. As a result of the recent surge, the coin not only exploded in value but in popularity as well. It presently has a market cap of over $65 billion, surpassing the value of many notable companies in the world. With many people assuming that Dogecoin founders Markus and Palmer must have made bank from the massive increase in the value of the coin, let’s find out how much they are actually worth.
Dogecoin Founders and Their Net Worths
Billy Markus
- Age: N/A
- Net Worth: N/A
- Country of Residence: United States
Although Billy Markus, an IBM software engineer founded the meme cryptocurrency, he sold all his tokens in the year 2015 when he had financial problems as he was laid off from his job. He used the money he realized from the sales of his crypto holdings at the time to purchase a second-hand Honda Civic car. Currently, his net worth is unknown. He leads a quiet life and loves staying out of the spotlight. The video game-obsessed software engineer stepped back from the project in 2015 when he discovered that the community had grown beyond his control and was becoming increasingly serious and toxic.
Initially, Markus had the intention for the cryptocurrency to be nothing more than fun, inspiration, absurdity, creativity, and generosity. But as the year passes by, the community grew rapidly and it became difficult for Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer to preserve the initial idea as people took interest in the price of the coin and started investing in it. Even though the two have made many people rich by creating Dogecoin, they are not benefitting from the surge in the coin’s value.
It’s worth noting that before Dogecoin, Billy Markus had made the first attempt at founding crypto. He serves as the founder of the virtual currency, Bell. He named the coin after the currency used in Animal Crossing, a Nintendo video game. The project wasn’t quite successful because he programmed the rewards to be random instead of it being consistent like the regular cryptocurrencies.
Jackson Palmer
- Age: N/A
- Net Worth: N/A
- Country of Residence: United States
Like Billy Markus, Jackson Palmer’s net worth is unknown. Nonetheless, he must have made huge wealth from his over 11 years of association with Adobe. Palmer is a graduate of the University of Newcastle and currently serves as the director of product management, growth & data science at Adobe. The software engineer founded Dogecoin in his twenties while working as a member of the Adobe Systems Marketing Department in Sydney, Australia. Having been following the developments in the cryptocurrency world for years, Palmer jokingly tweeted about investing in Dogecoin in 2013.
With the meme of Shiba Inu dog misspelled as “doge” gaining popularity at the time, he photoshopped the meme on a coin and named it after the Shiba Inu dog – Dogecoin. Unfortunately, Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus won’t be making any profit from the enormous rise in the value of the digital currency as both signed out from the project a few years back. They reportedly shared only $5000 worth of Dogecoin as they didn’t pre-mine a substantial amount of the coin before launching it into the public domain. Every serious cryptocurrency founder pre-mines the cryptocurrency before launching but Palmer and Markus didn’t plan on launching a cryptocurrency. The duo only visualized Dogecoin as a big joke that would die off. To their greatest surprise, the big joke has eventually turned into a big deal.
What is Dogecoin?
Dogecoin is a digital currency designed as an instant and fun payment system that is free from traditional banking fees. The cryptocurrency founders, Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus, named it after the once-popular doge meme and its logo is the face of the Shina Inu dog. After Palmer jokingly tweeted about investing in Dogecoin and highlighted the coin being the next big thing, his friends encouraged him to follow up on the project. As such, he created the Dogecoin.com domain and photoshopped the logo on a coin, and uploaded it. He then left a note that anyone interested in the project should contact him.
Not quite long, Billy Markus came across the domain and contacted Palmer. Within three hours, Markus had created the cryptocurrency using Bitcoin source code which was publicly available at the time. He derived it from the open-source software project, Litecoin. Seeing the project as a joke, he changed all the fonts to Comic Sans. The two then launched Dogecoin on December 6th, 2013 as a peer-to-peer digital currency with an intention of it reaching a far broader demographic than Bitcoin.
Two weeks after the coin was launched, its value increased by 300 percent and within one month, the site was visited by over one million people. Soon after, the coin grew rapidly in popularity as it got picked on Reddit in the same 2013 and had a valuation of $8 million. Initially, Dogecoin had no worth and was mainly used on the internet for tipping. It emerged as the second most-tipped virtual currency in just one week of its launching. Due to its wide usage, Dogecoin briefly surpassed Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in trading volume in 2014.
Following an intense rally by the subreddit, StatoshiStreetBets, the coin started gaining momentum subsequently and was valued at over $1 billion in 2018. Currently, the meme cryptocurrency has captured widespread public attention, thanks to high profile support from several celebrities including Elon Musk, Snoop Dogg, Mark Cuban, and Gene Simmons. These crypto investors are seriously pushing to get the price of Dogecoin to $1 per coin. Amazingly, Dogecoin which started as a tweet before getting adopted into a virtual currency has now amounted to a great fortune in the real world.
Cryptocurrency is promising, but please invest with caution! https://t.co/A4kplcP8Vq
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 7, 2021
As of this writing, the cryptocurrency is valued at over 50 cents per coin. Based on its current market cap of over $65 billion, Dogecoin is the fourth-largest cryptocurrency behind Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Binance coin.
The Difference Between Dogecoin and Bitcoin
Dogecoin and Bitcoin have a lot of similarities in the sense that both are cryptocurrencies that run on blockchain technology. They use cryptography to secure all transactions carried out on their blockchain networks. Nevertheless, there exist a few differences between the two digital currencies.
- While Bitcoin has a limit to the number of coins that can be mined (21 million), Dogecoin has no limit. In fact, over 120 billion Doge tokens are in circulation at the moment, with about 5 billion being produced by the system every year.
- As a result of not having a lifetime cap, Dogecoin is not a very effective store of value. Bitcoin, on the other hand, has the ability to grow its value over time because it has a limited number that can be mined.
- Unlike Bitcoin that is complex to mine and has a higher transaction fee, Dogecoin is quicker and easier to mine and its transaction is very small when compared to that of BTC.
