Such Dogecoin. Much Validity. How one altcoin may have turned into cryptocurrencys best marketing tool

7 hours ago May. 4, 2014 - 8:00 AM PDT

An unlikely sponsormaking its NASCAR debut later on Sunday: Dogecoin, with its cartoon Shiba Inu staring down drivers in a cuteway from the bumper of car 98.

Josh Wise, the cars driver, qualified for the Aarons 499 race in Talladega but needed the money for the sponsorship. The Dogecoin community reached out to Wiseand raised more than $55,000 to pay for the doge-wrapped car. Like many people, Wise had never heard of the cryptocurrency instead, the Doge community found him.

The meme-based altcoin is worth a fraction of a penny, but its true value is in its ability to introduce people to the concept ofcryptocurrency, which has become a very big deal over the last year with the advent of bitcoin. For the Dogecoin community, Wises situationwas a chance to help someone out Shibes, as the community members call themselves, areknown for their fundraising.But through the Dogecoin activism, the cryptocurrency community is gaining something even more valuable: exposure to new audiences.

Acurrency that looks like a joke started as one.

The doge meme, pronounced DOHJ, pairs a mispronunciation of dog from a Homestar Runner videowith a photo of a Shiba Inu with raised eyebrows.On the photo,phrases like Such Doge. Much happy. Wow are overlaid in colorful Comic Sans.Jackson Palmer, a marketing professional at Adobe, first tweeted in November that he was going to invest in Dogecoin after hed seen a bunch of different altcoins with ridiculous names.

The momentum and virality of the meme took it from there.

After a couple people encouraged Palmer to create Dogecoin, he bought the domain name, put a picture of Doge on the virtualcoin and slapped on a funny tagline. He kept getting retweeted and the visitor count went through the roof. Billy Markus, a programmer who had been developing a spinoff of an altcoin, tweeted at Palmer that he was able to change all of the fonts in his currency to Comic Sans. A few weeks after Palmers first tweet, the pair launched Dogecoin on Dec. 8, 2013.

We thought Yeah, well release it and like most funny things online, people will use it for three days and then theyll give it up and thats it, said Palmer in an interview with Gigaom. We put it up on Dogecoin.com and the thing just exploded. I wasnt even mining it at the time.

In the first month alone, the site had more than a million unique visitors and even surpassed bitcoin in the number of daily transactions for a couple weeks. The Dogetipbot, which doge fans can use to tip people through social networks for posting funny or interesting comment, has already processed more than $150,000 in tips. With those numbers, its obvious that the Internet found dogecoin to be funny but kept coming back.

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Such Dogecoin. Much Validity. How one altcoin may have turned into cryptocurrencys best marketing tool