How many Dogecoins are there?
Dogecoin’s supply is growing, but how many Dogecoins are there?
Contents
Dogecoin is one of the cryptocurrencies that have dominated the news agenda over the past year. The crypto that started off as a joke ended up becoming a major player in the crypto sphere in 2021, and it remains one of the more notable cryptocurrencies in 2022.
So how many Dogecoins, or DOGE, are there? Let’s see if we can answer that…
Supply and demand
How many Dogecoins are available has an impact on the crypto’s price.
There is a maximum supply of 21 billion Bitcoin. This limit has meant BTC is comparatively scarce which, in turn, has driven the price of Bitcoin up. Conversely, XRP has a total supply of 100 billion, which means that, ultimately, its price is going to be considerably lower than that of Bitcoin.
While price is not the only way to measure a cryptocurrency’s size – the total market cap can be a better indicator of a crypto’s overall power and importance – it is a headline figure that gets people’s attention. This, in turn, can drive adoption which should, theoretically, give it increased utility. Ultimately, that’s the goal for pretty much any cryptocurrency.
DOGE uses its own Dogecoin blockchain. This uses a proof-of-work consensus, which means that people have to solve an increasingly complex series of mathematical equations in order to mine the coin. This method of consensus is shared with Bitcoin, but there is one very important difference between BTC and DOGE.
As we have already said, Bitcoin has a maximum supply, and once Bitcoin number 21 billion is mined, that is it. There will be no more new BTC coming onto the market. However, DOGE is somewhat different: there is no maximum supply when it comes to Dogecoin. Let’s look at the reason for that.
A never-ending supply?
Dogecoin was launched, basically as a parody of cryptocurrency, in 2013.
Around the time the coin first came out, there was some debate among users as to whether DOGE should be inflationary or deflationary. Cryptocurrencies with a fixed maximum supply are deflationary. On one hand, this means that a coin can keep, or even grow, its value, but on the other hand it can encourage people to hold on to their crypto in the hope that the price will shoot up.
While Dogecoin did not specify a limit on the amount of DOGE that would be circulating, there was belief in some quarters that the people behind the coin would institute a limit. In fact, there were some plans to institute a hard cap of 100 billion DOGE. These hopes were quashed in 2014, however, when Dogecoin co-founder Jackson Palmer announced that there would be no cap on the number of DOGE.
He said: “We’ve decided to leave the Dogecoin code base as it was originally released, and not implement a change. The goal for the currency is to keep approximately 100 billion coins in circulation. Thus after 100 billion Dogecoins are created, rewards will continue at 10k each block. This will help maintain mining and stabilise the number of coins in circulation (considering lost wallets and various other ways coins may be destroyed) at 100 billion.”
This meant that when the amount of DOGE in the world reached 100 billion, which took place at some point in 2018, it did not stop there. Instead, more and more Dogecoin came onto the market, with 10,000 Dogecoin coming into play whenever a new block was mined.
When you consider that a new block is mined about every minute or so, that means that there were about 14.4 million new DOGE every day and there are about 5.26 billion Dogecoins entering circulation every year. As things stand, that is not going to stop at any time soon.
As of 22 June 2022, there were in the region of 132.67 billion Dogecoin and that figure will continue to rise by a considerable amount as time goes on. The precise answer to the question of how many Dogecoins exists changes all the time, with the total number of Dogecoins rising pretty much minute-by-minute.
Dogecoin and Litecoin utilise something called merge mining. This means that someone who mines Dogecoin can also mine Litecoin without having to get any additional software. This, at least in theory, opens up DOGE mining to Litecoin miners and, indeed, vice versa. This keeps the supply of both coins pumping, as there will be people who are able to do both.
Nodes and prices
One other important factor when it comes to measuring the size of DOGE is the number of nodes on the Dogecoin network. A node is a computer on the system which helps manage the blockchain.
As 12 May 2022, there were 1,112 nodes helping the system to run, according to the Blockchair website. This was down from 27 January, when there were 1,518 nodes, but up from 1,090 on 2 September 2021. With Dogecoin very much a growing platform, this rise from September to January was to be expected, but it is notable that it happened at a time when the coin’s price wavered somewhat. In real terms, the price dropped by more than 50% over that time, from around $0.30 to just over $0.14.
While Dogecoin is inflationary, with new coins coming into existence all the time, that does not necessarily mean that the coin is destined to go down. In fact, we can see that there is no inevitability to the coin’s price decline when we consider the history of DOGE.
The coin was valued at less than a cent for most of its early years, only breaking through that mark during the crypto bubble of late 2017 and early 2018. It was only in 2021 that it settled above that figure, reaching an all-time high of $0.7376 on 8 May that year. This was a case of market forces, based on a demand for DOGE and the coin’s increased utility, overtaking inflationary measures put in place via the coin’s supply mechanism.
Since then the price has gone down, and by 22 June 2022, the crisis caused by the untethering of UST and the collapse of Luna in May, coupled with Celsius barring withdrawals the following month, confirming the bear market, meant it was somewhere around $0.06275.
Finally, as we have established that the answer to the question “How many Dogecoins are left?” is “There is no answer, because there is no maximum supply,” it is worth pointing out some other stats.
If you want to ask “how big is the Dogecoin blockchain?”, then there is an answer: as of 22 June 2022, it’s at 60.38GB (gigabytes). At the time of writing, there were 22,398 people who held more than $10,000 in Dogecoin, half the number there were on 27 January (although this may be down to the price pretty much halving over that time period) and there were more than four million blocks in the blockchain.
FAQs
How many Dogecoins are mined per day?
Since 10,000 Dogecoins are mined every time a block is added, and there is about one block added to the Dogecoin blockchain every minute or so, about 14.4 million Dogecoins are mined per day.
How many Dogecoins are left?
Theoretically, there is an infinite number of Dogecoins left to come into circulation. This is because there is no maximum supply of Dogecoin, meaning new DOGE will continue to be mined for the foreseeable future.
Who owns the most Dogecoin?
The statistics suggest that the most Dogecoin is owned by an anonymous crypto user who has 29,661,944,088 DOGE, worth more than $1.8bn and comprising a little under 22% of the circulating supply. We do not know whether the wallet with this amount in it, which is linked to the Robinhood platform, is held by an individual, a group of people, or by Robinhood itself.
What is also worth noting is that the wallet, DBs4WcRE7eysKwRxHNX88XZVCQ9M6QSUSz, only started taking DOGE in February 2021.
