In a surprising turn of events, Dogecoin re-established the Dogecoin Foundation after six years. Featured on its advisory board are many prominent names, one of them being Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin.
What is the Dogecoin Foundation and what happened to it?
The Dogecoin Foundation is a non-profit organization that supports the Dogecoin ecosystem, develops the Dogecoin core client, and is charged with the protection and safekeeping of the Dogecoin assets, such as its domain and accounts. It was established in 2014 but lied dormant for many years, with Dogecoin being drive mostly by its community.
To much surprise, the foundation announced it would re-establish the foundation. According to the statement, the foundation was not looking to “take control” of the Dogecoin Core Wallet project but aiming to accelerate the development effort by supporting Dogecoin Core and future Dogecoin Developers. It would also announce new projects complementing the current Core Wallet to enable faster integration for Financial, Social and Charitable projects wishing to use Dogecoin.
A change in direction
This came unexpectedly since, for many years, its community mostly governed Dogecoin. The foundation cited concerns about numerous attempts to co-opt the brand in various jurisdictions as a motivating factor to get involved again. Dogecoin would still remain true to its manifesto of “doing only good every day”. Listed among the board members on the website are a couple of illustrious names:
- Dogecoin co-founder Billy Markus and Dogecoin core developer Max Keller
- Neuralink CEO Jared Birchall, seemingly representing the interests of Dogecoin bull Elon Musk
- Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum founder
Buterin’s stance on Dogecoin
Buterin has been notably outspoken and optimistic about Dogecoin. In a Twitter AMA among the 268 people he follows, Buterin voiced his hope for a potential switch from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake for Dogecoin since that would fit well with the currency’s non-greedy wholesome ethos.
Buterin has also repeatedly talked about potential cooperation between Ethereum and Dogecoin. “If Doge wants to somehow bridge to Ethereum, and then people can trade DOGE thousands of times a second inside of loopring, then that would be amazing, […] I think if we can have a secure Doge-to-Ethereum bridge. That would be amazing, and then when Ethereum gets any scalability that works for Ethereum assets, you would be able to trade wrapped DOGE with very low transaction fees and very high speed as well.”
Involvement in the Dogecoin foundation may hence be the first step to future cooperation. Notably, Buterin also gave away his stack of Shiba Inu, another meme coin akin to Dogecoin, to charity after the project tried to hijack his popularity to boost the token price. Considering the charitable contributions in and out of the crypto ecosystem by the Dogecoin foundation and the strong grassroots movement supporting the currency, the future is looking promising for the meme coin. Still, short-term prices only briefly reacted to the news and, as of September 21, Dogecoin is down to $0.20, down from its all-time high of $0.74 and a brief spike to $0.32 following its Dogecoin Foundation announcement.
