The DRC-20 Effect: How Dogecoin Daily Volume Outpaced Bitcoin

The DRC-20 Effect: How Dogecoin Tokens Outpaced Bitcoin’s Daily Transactions

In a recent surge of activity, Dogecoin hit a record-breaking high of 719,000 daily transactions this Tuesday (May 16, 2023), according to Pedro Solimano’s May 17th article in Decrypt. The burst of activity was driven by the newly implemented DRC-20 standard that allows meme coins to be created on the Dogecoin network.

This sudden surge in activity is credited to the rise of “Doginals,” Dogecoin’s unique take on non-fungible tokens (NFTs), made possible by the new DRC-20 standard, which is similar to Bitcoin’s BRC-20 standard. These standards allow for the inclusion of arbitrary and non-financial data in blocks. Dogecoin users have been keen on crafting tokens into “shibes,” the smallest Dogecoin denomination, and tracking their movements across the network.

Dogecoin is currently mined using PoW, so will have similar issues to Bitcoin regarding inscribing data into transactions on blocks and onto coins.

Dogecoin chain siz currently about 62Gb, about a tenth of Bitcoin, and block size is small, under 300kB, again about one-tenth of Bitcoin.

So, it doesn't strike as a great chain to mint NFTs, but is good to mint a ton of other memecoins. Still needs some dev of the protocol to make such para-coins more easy to trade.