About Dogecoin
Dogecoin began in 2013 as a joke fork of Litecoin and grew into a widely traded coin used for tipping and small payments. It has no supply cap: a fixed number of new DOGE is minted every year, so issuance continues indefinitely.
How Dogecoin is secured
Dogecoin’s protection is borrowed from another network. From block 371,337, which the project’s own release notes expected the chain to reach around 12 September 2014, it has been merge-mined with Litecoin under an arrangement called auxiliary proof of work. Litecoin miners point the same work at both chains, and Dogecoin blocks are produced alongside Litecoin ones at no extra cost to the miner. The problem it was built to solve is named on Dogecoin’s own site. The hashrate protecting the chain, meaning the total mining effort pointed at it, was falling. Before the change the two networks competed for the same miners, who moved between them for whichever was briefly more profitable.
Most of the work protecting Dogecoin is therefore work done for Litecoin, and paid for by Litecoin. The arrangement has held for more than a decade. It is a dependency rather than something the network generates for itself.
The reward is fixed at 10,000 DOGE, the coin’s own unit, per block, and has been since block 600,000, where the halving schedule that ran before it ended. A fixed amount per block means a shrinking percentage, because the same number of new coins each year is measured against a total that keeps rising. Cutting the number is possible and has been asked for: one proposal to reduce the reward was raised in the open in January 2025 and closed the next day without being adopted. The people who would have to adopt such a change are not here for Dogecoin. The miners whose agreement it needs are mining Litecoin, and Dogecoin is the by-product.
Longer read: How Dogecoin is secured and how new DOGE is issued. Most of the computing power protecting Dogecoin is doing Litecoin's work at the same time. What merged mining is, why it was adopted in 2014, and why Dogecoin has a fixed block reward instead of a supply cap.
See more prices on the crypto in AUD hub, and how this figure is struck on the methodology page.