Dogecoin: Online Currency Gains Legitimacy With Jamaican Bobsled Team Fundraiser

Dogecoin may seem like a joke at face value.

After all, the online currency is based on the internet Doge meme, which hardly screams credibility, but slowly the currency has been building its stature, and an act of generosity using the Dogecoins may help put it over the top.

Recently a message board on the website Reddit that’s dedicated to the Dogecoin decided to use the currency as a fundraiser for the Jamaican bobsled team, which was $80,000 short of being able to accept its bid to the 2014 Olympics in Sochi.

The fundraiser ended up bringing close to $30,000 for the Jamaican team, and in doing so greatly increased the value of the Dogecoin. To get the donations to the team, the fundraiser’s organizers converted them to Bitcoins, the more established of the cryptocurrencies.

As a result, the Dogecoin-to-Bitcoin exchange rate rose more than 50 percent in 12 hours, the UK’s Guardian noted.

“Myself and Jackson Palmer [the creator of Dogecoin] were at a local pub trivia in Sydney when we noticed the value of Dogecoin had more than doubled since we’d last checked so we raced back to my house to ensure we could get the best price for the donations in a form the team could actually use,” said Liam Butler, who is in charge of the Dogecoin Foundation. “As much as we have faith in Dogecoin to become the community currency of the Internet, we still understand that the team need to buy their airfares in a fiat currency.”

There is a bit of difference between the Bitcoin and Dogecoin. There are roughly 21 million Bitcoins available for mining, but hundreds of billions of Dogecoins, though the value of the Dogecoin is far less. Late last year, the average was about 0.046 BTC.

Though the market capitalization of all Dogecoins in circulation jumped from less than $25 million to close to $65 million in the last couple of days, the Dogecoin still has a lot of room to make up. The website CoinMarketCap.com shows that Dogecoin is only the seventh most valuable crypto-currency based on market capir