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As of January 2021, there are around 128 billion DOGE in circulation. Dogecoin has a block time of one minute, and the network rewards miners with 10,000 DOGE for every block they add. Therefore, Dogecoin has no cap on supply.

This supply schedule has an inflationary impact on DOGE's price. However, since block rewards are now fixed, issuance is actually decreasing relative to the coin's total supply. While possibly undesirable for investors, inflation is needed to incentivize Litecoin miners to secure the network.

Like many online phenomena, Doge memes don't really mean anything. People enjoy them because they're amusing, but there is no deep underlying concept to grasp.

The original meme that inspired Dogecoin features a scared looking Shiba Inu. Various brightly colored words and phrases, written in Comic Sans, surround the image. Each phrase is part of the dog's inner monologue and is written in a nonstandard style of English.

As is common online, internet users copied and built on the format. Not all subsequent Doge memes use exactly the same image. However, all Doge memes have Comic Sans text and at least one example of the iconic canine breed. They all make use of the same language conventions, too. Phrases like "so scare," "much wow" and "such treat" are examples.

Inspired by one of the most popular memes ever, Dogecoin had natural appeal from the start. However, given people's love of dogs in general, along with the particularly cute image used in Dogecoin branding, there's a good chance DOGE would have won a lot of fans, even if the meme never existed.

Dogecoin's specifications also add to its popularity. Its creation was in part a commentary on the cryptocurrency industry itself. Bitcoin's early success had inspired the creation of other digital currencies, which often featured a pre-mine or some other mechanism to enrich their founders.

Dogecoin, by contrast, had no pre-mine, and its extreme inflation rate made it unlikely to appeal to a "get rich quick" crowd. A fun Dogecoin community quickly formed around the project. More recently, DOGE has attracted A-list fans, including Tesla's Elon Musk and rock star Gene Simmons.

Dogecoin was a fork of Luckycoin, which was a fork of Litecoin. Dogecoin and Litecoin are both open-source, decentralized cryptocurrencies that use the Scrypt proof-of-work algorithm. However, there are several differences between the two projects.

Dogecoin's one minute average block time is shorter than Litecoin's 2.5 minutes. There is also no limit on the number of DOGE that the protocol can create. Meanwhile, Litecoin has a supply cap of 84 million. Litecoin mining rewards halve every 840,000 blocks to reach this limit, whereas Dogecoin rewards are fixed at 10,000 DOGE per block.