Dogecoin is getting a dedicated company to develop its ecosystem, with the teams behind the meme coin's main consumer products joining a single organisation aimed at giving DOGE more everyday uses.
Announced on Tuesday, Dogecoin Labs was formed together with the Dogecoin Foundation to consolidate the products, intellectual property and development teams scattered across the Dogecoin universe into a single independent organisation.
It will own and operate three core products: the MyDoge wallet, the DogeOS app platform and the Such App, a payments tool for merchants, with resources and talent drawn from both the Foundation and House of Doge.
The aim is to fill a gap the company considers Dogecoin's main weakness. Despite being among the largest and most recognised cryptocurrencies, with high liquidity, millions of holders and one of the most active communities in the crypto market, the number of products and businesses built on DOGE remains small relative to that audience. Dogecoin Labs, led by CEO Jordan Jefferson, founder of MyDoge and DogeOS, intends to change that by building wallets, payment solutions, commerce, trading, DeFi, gaming, artificial intelligence and social apps.
"No other digital asset has Dogecoin's combination of liquidity, community and cultural reach, and its potential has barely been tapped," said Jefferson, adding that the community has been calling for "DOGE at US$ 1" for years and that the goal now is "to build the economy that ambition requires".
The initiative builds on recent work. DogeOS launched its public testnet on 30 September, giving developers an Ethereum-compatible environment to build Dogecoin apps, while MyDoge, which has surpassed 500,000 users without paid acquisition, rolled out a V3 update connecting the wallet to those apps. Together with Such App's commerce infrastructure, the three products aim to connect developers, consumers and businesses in a functional DOGE economy.
The Foundation will continue its governance, open-source support and advocacy work, while Labs will handle commercial product development.
The reorganisation comes at a low point for the token. DOGE was trading around US$ 0.084 on Tuesday, up 3.9% on the day and with a market capitalisation of roughly US$ 13 billion, but down about 14% over the past month and around 88% from its May 2021 record.
Dogecoin's institutional track record has also been mixed: a 21Shares DOGE ETF, backed by the Dogecoin Foundation, launched on the Nasdaq this year, although Bitwise subsequently closed its own Dogecoin fund, citing low demand and the need to "streamline its product range to meet investors' evolving needs".
* Translated and edited with permission from Decrypt.
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