Dogecoin to Become the Internet’s Official Currency?
Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev has floated the idea of making Dogecoin the universal currency of the internet. On the heels of Robinhood’s addition of the cryptocurrency to its mobile trading platform, Tenev tweeted that he is contemplating “what that would take”.
Tenev is hoping to capitalize on the Dogecoin Foundation's slew of new proposals aimed at upgrading the coin’s utility. With an eye on their manifesto signed in August 2021, the organization states, “being useful, we value utility over technical brilliance.”
Dogecoin’s so-called “trail map” is a collection of projects such as:
Libdogecoin: a streamlined code library in its native C language, allowing users to create products compliant within the Dogecoin Network.
Proposed ‘Community Staking’, a change to Proof-of-Stake protocol.
GigaWallet: this will “allow a developer to add Dogecoin transactions to their platform, as easily as they might with any polished payment provider” and replace their current desktop wallet.
These highly ambitious projects have yet to capture the market’s attention. Over the last twelve months DOGE has held a steady floor price around 15 cents. However, these are still very early days.
And this is where Robinhood comes in. Robinhood users have long desired that Dogecoin be added to the app’s list of tradable cryptocurrencies. Now that it has been implemented, Tenev is wondering if the demand to integrate DOGE into Robinhood also signals an interest in the integration of DOGE more broadly into other apps and perhaps the internet generally.
Countless technical challenges lay ahead, but Tenev is thinking through many of them. In his recent tweet storm, Tenev states that transaction fees would have to be “vanishingly small” and that the block add time would have to decrease from one minute to around ten seconds.
Dogecoin is already moving toward more utility. Its Core 1.14.5 update late last year has significantly decreased transaction fees.
Controversially, Tenev points out that Dogecoin’s block size would have to increase. In order to stay on par with Visa’s current 65,000 transactions per second, Dogecoin would have to increase its throughput rate by 10,000X to keep its current block size of 1MB.
Dogecoin has a long road ahead to becoming the internet’s native currency, but it is certainly on its way. Other cryptos will follow Dogecoin’s lead in due course. DOGE is not striving to become the only coin used on the internet, just the most dominant.
If Vlad Tenev is right in his assumption about a broader demand for Dogecoin and the crypto’s developers can pull off the necessary technical upgrades, then the DOGE faithful may see their rockets really take off.
