Dogecoin
KLEAR3 ResearchPublished Updated
DOGEDogecoin, a Scrypt fork that started as a joke about the altcoin boom in December 2013, pays every miner a flat 10,000DOGE per block, forever: past a certain height the emission schedule stops halving and simply repeats. Its very first blocks, though, paid a reward drawn at random from the previous block's own hash.
What does Dogecoin actually do?
Dogecoin is a peer-to-peer payment network with no company behind it: anyone can send a payment, and no single party can block one. It settles through proof of work on the Scrypt algorithm, the same one Litecoin uses, rather than the SHA-256 that secures Bitcoin.
The GitHub organisation that publishes the code describes its own repository in three words: "very currency". It is not a marketing line written for outsiders, it is the actual description field on the repository, tagged cryptocurrency, dogecoin, wallet. The joke is part of the product.
Underneath the joke, the mechanics are unremarkable in the best sense. A payment is a line added to a shared ledger, and thousands of machines running Scrypt proof of work keep the same copy and agree on it by spending electricity, exactly as Bitcoin does with SHA-256. Nothing about how a Dogecoin payment settles is a joke.
What is unusual is what happens to new coins once they are mined, and that is the subject of most of this page: nothing in the code ever stops issuing them.
Source GitHub, read 2026-09-26
Is the code actually open?
Yes. The code has been public since December 2013 under the MIT licence, one of the most permissive there is, and forty-two versions have been tagged. No audit firm has ever reviewed it, and none is listed anywhere: the review model here is public code, not a paid report.
The MIT licence grants what most closed forks never grant: the right to read, reuse and resell whatever is built on this code, without asking anyone. That right has been in place since the repository opened, in December 2013.
Forty-two tagged releases is a modest number for thirteen years of history, and it says something true: most of what changes here is maintenance, not new design. The last genuinely new consensus rule, merge-mining with Litecoin, dates back to the project's first year.
Source GitHub, read 2026-09-26
Source GitHub, read 2026-09-26
No audit firm has reviewed this code, and none is listed anywhere in the repository. That absence is not unusual for a chain this old: Dogecoin never had a company to commission one, and the code has simply run, in public, for longer than most audited protocols have existed.
That is not a safety guarantee. It is a different kind of evidence than a report with a date on it: a dated report says what one team found on one specific version, in one week. Thirteen years without an exploited flaw say the code has held up against real attempts to break it, which a report by itself cannot show.
Source GitHub, read 2026-09-26
Is anyone still working on it?
Modestly. More than twelve years after launch, the repository still took 16 commits from 4 distinct Git identities over the ninety days we measured, the most recent one landing on 2026-09-10. That is not a dead project, but it is not a bustling one either.
16 commits from 4 people is a small number next to a chain like Bitcoin or Ethereum. It is also enough to keep the software building and the network running, which is what a thirteen-year-old payment coin mostly needs.
One caveat applies to every count on this site: ninety days is a window that slides on its own. The same measure taken next month will differ, without anything having happened, which is why the exact dates travel with the figure wherever it appears.
We also counted Git identities, not people: one person can sign commits under two names, and a company can hide behind one. The real number of humans involved could run either way.
Source GitHub, read 2026-09-26
What shows it is running
- The network answers — block 6,389,851
- The repository is still being worked on — 16 commits over the 90 days to 2026-09-26, 4 distinct Git identities
Source Blockchair · GitHub, read 2026-09-26
- The source code goes public on GitHub
- The Dogecoin network mines its first block
- Our ninety-day measurement window opens
- The most recent commit we found lands
Where does it actually run?
On one chain, its own, merge-mined with Litecoin rather than run alone. Since block 371,337 a Litecoin miner can also mine a Dogecoin block for free, sharing one proof of work between the two networks. A public aggregator put the chain at block 6,389,851 on the day we checked.
Merge-mining means a Litecoin miner can submit the very same proof of work to both chains at once, for no extra cost, and collect Dogecoin as a side effect of mining Litecoin. Dogecoin never had to attract its own mining industry from a standing start.
The trade-off is real: Dogecoin's security now depends on how much hash power Litecoin miners find it worthwhile to point at both chains, not on demand for DOGE itself. A chain that is merge-mined is not securing itself alone.
Wrapped tokens claiming to represent Dogecoin do circulate on other chains, issued by third parties. Those are claims on Dogecoin held by somebody, not Dogecoin, and this page does not cover them.
Source dogecoin/dogecoin — src/chainparams.cpp, read 2026-09-26
Source Blockchair, read 2026-09-26
Network verified by reading its current block height on a public node.
What the coin actually does
It pays the miner who adds a block, nothing else. There is no company treasury, no team allocation and no unlock schedule, because nobody issued it upfront. Since block 600,000, every block has paid a flat 10,000 DOGE, forever, with no total ever written into the code.
The schedule changed twice, and both changes are readable in the code. Below block 145,000, the reward paid for a block was drawn at random, seeded by the previous block's own hash, and could be as low as a single coin or as high as 999,999 DOGE for identical work.
From there, a fixed reward of 500,000 coins per block halves every 100,000 blocks, for five halvings, down to 15,625. A sixth halving would land near 7,812, by the same arithmetic; the code never runs it. Past that height it simply pays 10,000 DOGE, a lower number than the halving before it, and it never changes again.
At the network's target of one block a minute, that flat payment adds roughly 5,259,600,000 new coins a year, a figure we calculated from the code, not copied from anywhere. Against a circulating supply already past 156,069,756,383.705, that is a shrinking share of the total every year, even though the yearly amount itself never falls.
Source dogecoin/dogecoin — src/dogecoin.cpp, src/chainparams.cpp, read 2026-09-26
Source dogecoin/dogecoin — src/dogecoin.cpp, read 2026-09-26
- In circulation156,069,756,383.705
- Issued, not circulating680,000
- What the token is forDirectly verified
- How many existDirectly verified
- How new ones appearDirectly verified
- Who received themDirectly verified
- Who can change the rulesDirectly verified
The KLEAR3 rating
Not rated yet
We only rate what we have measured. On this project too few axes rest on a sourced fact, so no overall score comes out — a number built on gaps would read as a verdict on the protocol when it is a verdict on our own research.
Nothing measured yet on Audits
Each axis gets 0 to 5 from the facts in the register, against thresholds written in advance. The overall score is their weighted average, and it only appears once at least 5 of the 6 axes rest on a measured fact.
- Audits ×1.3
- Open code ×1.2
- Business model ×1.1
- Token alignment ×1
- Governance ×1
- Maturity ×0.7
- Open code5
public repository · MIT licence · 42 published releases · 16 commits in 90 days
- Auditsnot measured
What holds it back no report in our registry · no report opened: we do not know what they found
- Business model5
business model published by the protocol · paid by whoever sends the transaction · collected by the miner who produces the block · all of it to the miner, nothing is destroyed
- Governance2
no versioned proposal repository, so no written procedure
- Token alignment4
circulating share known · emission schedule published · no initial allocation: every coin comes from the block reward
What holds it back total supply not measured
- Maturity5
12 years of public code · 1 network verified by us
We rate the protocol: how it is built, how much of it can be checked, how its token lines up. Never an investment. A high score is not advice to buy, and a low one is not advice to sell.
What we could not establish
Three things a reader should weigh. No audit firm has ever reviewed this code, and none is listed anywhere. We did not verify who holds the supply, and the circulating figure quoted here comes from an aggregator we did not check against the chain ourselves.
The circulating figure of 156,069,756,383.705DOGE comes from an aggregator, not from a node we queried ourselves. It is also a snapshot: by the time this page is read, a new year's worth of flat block rewards will already have been added to it.
We found no versioned, public proposal process for changing the rules, comparable to Bitcoin's own proposal repository. That is not proof one does not exist somewhere less visible; it is what a public search turned up, and no more.
Our rating gives Dogecoin nothing on the audit axis. Read that as what it is, an absence of reports, not a finding against the code.
Frequently asked questions
Is there really no limit to how much Dogecoin will ever exist?
No, and the code says so directly instead of leaving it to be worked out. Past a certain height the reward stops halving and simply repeats forever. Nothing in the protocol ever reaches zero, so nothing ever produces a final total.
Five halvings bring the reward down from 500,000 coins to 15,625 per block, at a new interval every 100,000 blocks. A sixth halving would land near 7,812, but the code never runs it.
Past block 600,000 it pays a flat 10,000DOGE forever, a lower number than the halving just before it and not a continuation of the pattern. That flat payment is also why the supply keeps climbing: at the network's target of one block a minute, it adds roughly 5,259,600,000 new coins a year, a number we calculated from the code, not copied from anywhere.
How did the earliest miners actually get paid?
Not with a fixed amount. Below block 145,000, the code drew the reward at random, seeded by the previous block's own hash, rather than paying a fixed sum. Two miners solving blocks minutes apart could be paid wildly different amounts for identical work.
The draw itself was bounded: the maximum possible payout at the very first halving step was 999,999 DOGE, and it could fall as low as a single coin. A miner who wanted a predictable income from this network in its first months simply did not have one.
The randomness ends at block 145,000, once a rule the project itself calls simplified rewards takes over: a fixed amount for a fixed stretch of blocks, halving on schedule from that point. Everything most guides describe as Dogecoin's emission schedule actually only applies from here onward, not from the genesis block.
Is Dogecoin actually secured by Litecoin?
Not exactly, but the two are tied together. Since a fixed block height, a Litecoin miner can submit the same proof of work to both chains at once, for free, earning Dogecoin as a side effect of mining Litecoin. Dogecoin never had to build its own mining industry from scratch.
The mechanism is called merged mining, and it activated at block 371,337 on this chain. The code names the chain identifier chosen for it after Josh Wise, the NASCAR driver the Dogecoin community famously crowdfunded a race sponsorship for that same year, a detail that survives as a code comment.
Litecoin miners are not required to help: it is optional for them, and it costs a Litecoin miner nothing extra to do it. What it buys Dogecoin is hash rate that would otherwise take years to attract on its own, at the cost of tying its security to how much Litecoin, not Dogecoin, miners find worth mining.
Read next: our Bitcoin profile shows the opposite design choice, a hard total the code never quite reaches, and our Ethereum profile shows a chain that gave up spending electricity on proof of work entirely, in 2022.
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