How Dogecoin is secured and how new DOGE is issued

Dogecoin's security does not mostly come from Dogecoin. Its blocks are protected by proof of work, and since September 2014 much of that work is done by people who are mining Litecoin at the same time. This guide explains that arrangement, the problem it was built to fix, and how new DOGE is created.

What "secured" means for a chain like this

Dogecoin runs on proof of work. Computers called miners repeat a mathematical guessing game until one of them finds a number that produces a valid block. The winner adds that block of transactions to the chain and receives newly created DOGE.

Two plain terms carry most of the explanation.

Hashrate is the total amount of guessing being done across the whole network, measured in guesses per second. It is the closest thing the chain has to a measure of how much effort protects it.

A 51 per cent attack is what happens when one party controls more than half of that guessing power. With a majority, an attacker can push aside recent blocks that everyone else accepted and publish a different version of recent history, which allows the same coins to be spent twice. The attacker cannot take coins from other people's wallets or change the rules, but reversing recent payments is damaging enough.

So the security question for any proof-of-work chain is simple to state: how expensive would it be to out-mine everyone else at once.

Why Dogecoin stopped mining on its own

Dogecoin started in December 2013 as a fork of the Litecoin code, created by Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus, who writes under the name Shibetoshi Nakamoto. Because it was a fork, it inherited Litecoin's hashing method, called scrypt. Scrypt is the specific puzzle that miners solve, and hardware built for one scrypt chain works on any other scrypt chain.

That shared method created a real problem. The same pool of scrypt miners could point their machines at either network, and they moved between the two chasing whichever was more rewarding that hour. Dogecoin's hashrate rose and fell sharply as a result. A chain whose protection swings that far is exposed, because an attacker only needs to beat whatever is left when the miners have gone elsewhere. Dogecoin was considered vulnerable to a 51 per cent attack in exactly this way.

In August 2014 the development team shipped auxiliary proof of work, usually shortened to AuxPoW, which allows merged mining with Litecoin. It took effect on the chain at block 371,337 on 11 September 2014, and within weeks mining difficulty on Dogecoin had risen by more than a thousand per cent as large mining pools extended their operations to cover it. Difficulty is the automatic setting that keeps blocks arriving on schedule, so a rise of that size is a direct reading of how much more computing power had arrived.

How merged mining actually works

Merged mining means one round of work counts twice.

A miner assembles a Dogecoin block, takes an identifier for it, and embeds that identifier inside the Litecoin block it is already working on. It then mines the Litecoin block as normal. If the result is good enough for Litecoin, the miner earns Litecoin. If it is good enough for Dogecoin, which needs a lower standard of difficulty, the miner submits the Litecoin work to Dogecoin as evidence and earns DOGE as well.

Three consequences follow, and they are the heart of the topic.

• The extra computing power costs the miner nothing beyond what Litecoin mining already costs. That is why it was adopted so widely, so quickly.
• Dogecoin blocks are still Dogecoin blocks. Dogecoin miners still assemble them, still hold the transactions, and still receive the DOGE reward. Litecoin does not pay Dogecoin's rewards and does not hold Dogecoin's ledger.
• Dogecoin's protection now moves with Litecoin's mining economy rather than with its own. The dependency is one way and it is structural.

That last point is the part most short explanations skip. Dogecoin did not buy security. It arranged to receive it as a by-product of another network's ordinary activity, and it did so on purpose, to fix a weakness it had already been shown to have.

What Dogecoin issues, and why there is no cap

Dogecoin has never shipped a hard supply cap in its released rules. The code published on launch day, 6 December 2013, briefly carried a slow decay that would have bounded total issuance, and it was taken out the same day. In March 2014 the reward schedule was made deterministic rather than random, and it kept halving every 100,000 blocks until block 600,000, mined on 25 February 2015. From that block on, every block has paid a flat 10,000 DOGE.

The halving schedule finished at block 600,000 and there is no end date in the rules. Every block since has paid the same 10,000 DOGE, indefinitely.

This is worth stating precisely, because the shorthand "unlimited supply" misleads. The amount added is fixed in absolute terms, not in proportional terms. Since the same number is added each year while the running total keeps growing, each year's addition is a smaller share of the total than the year before it was. That arithmetic pattern is usually called disinflationary. It describes the issuance rule and nothing else, and says nothing about value.

The proposal to cut the reward

One change to that schedule has been formally raised. A proposal in the project's public issue tracker asked for the block reward to drop from 10,000 DOGE to 1,000 DOGE, reducing annual issuance from about 5 billion to about 500 million.

It is closed and was not adopted. The current rule is the 2014 rule.

Who can change any of this

Dogecoin's governance is informal next to chains that build voting into the protocol. There is no treasury, no stake-weighted ballot and no formal process for approving a change.

In practice a change has to be written into the node software, and then enough node operators and miners have to choose to download and run it. Nobody can compel them. This is why the reward proposal above could be raised, discussed and closed without anything happening, and why the merged-mining change in 2014 is notable: it needed broad agreement and it got it.

Dogecoin describes itself on its own site as an open-source peer-to-peer cryptocurrency, with an emphasis on community fundraising and charitable giving. The organising structure that follows from that is loose by design.

Where to look next

• Dogecoin price in Australian dollars for the live figure this guide deliberately leaves out.
• Litecoin price in Australian dollars for the network the mining work comes from.
• Crypto data pages for the other coins we track in Australian dollars.
• Glossary for plain definitions of the money terms used across the site.
• All guides for the rest of our explainers.

Sources

• Dogecoin to Allow Litecoin Merge Mining in Network Security Bid, CoinDesk, 4 August 2014 - the announcement of the plan, which gave no integration date.
• Dogecoin Core FAQ, dogecoin/dogecoin - the reward schedule, including the permanent 10,000 DOGE from block 600,000.
• dogecoin.cpp, dogecoin/dogecoin - GetDogecoinBlockSubsidy, the halving schedule and the perpetual reward.
• Case Study: Merged Mining in Dogecoin & Litecoin, Binance Research, July 2019.
• Reduce block reward from 10,000 to 1,000 DOGE, dogecoin/dogecoin issue tracker.
• What is Dogecoin?, Dogepedia, dogecoin.com.

General information about how the Dogecoin network works, not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold anything, and not a statement about value. Tradergy keeps no account and collects no personal data. Reviewed by the Tradergy editorial team, September 2026.