From Meme to Cryptocurrency: New ‘Dogumentary’ Chronicles the Rise of Dogecoin
A group of filmmakers and community participants is working on a feature film chronicling the rise of Kabosu, the Shiba Inu featured in the famous Doge meme, from an abandoned puppy to a global icon.
The Doge documentary, titled “Dogumentary,” is produced by Own the Doge and Web3 art and culture collective PleasrDAO and portrays how a Shiba Inu dog inspired a cryptocurrency with an $11.6 billion market cap, a life philosophy, and a holy pilgrimage to Japan over the past decade.
Own the Doge, a Doge-oriented NFT community, and PleasrDAO recently acquired the rights to the original Doge meme image for $4 million worth of Ethereum earlier this year.
The film is directed by Jon Lynn, an English stage and film director and producer known for directing the comedy films such as Clue, Nuns on the Run, and My Cousin Vinny, and produced by San Francisco-based production company New Revolution Media.
Members of the Doge community, as well as PleasrDAO and Own the Doge, have funded the initiative to date.
The production is currently in the works, but a sneak peek is already out.
Announcing THE Doge Documentary!
— tridog (@tridog) April 10, 2023
It’s FINALLY time to celebrate nearly 2 decades of #Doge & @Kabosumama
This will be the FIRST EVER feature length film about Doge when completed.
Here's a never-before-seen sneak peek: pic.twitter.com/cnTeMrwmpT
The documentary was shot in Japan and the US, covering interviews with various personalities, namely Kabosumama, the doge’s owner Atsuko Sato, and John Monarch, the person who first created the DOGE meme.
Although this project is very niche, its creators hope that it will break through to a wider audience.
Jim Toth, the former Hollywood talent agent, and Evan Rosenfeld, a documentary producer, have reportedly expressed support for the project. Additionally, Arthur Jones, director of Pepe the Frog-inspired documentary “Feels Good Man,” has joined the project.
The next step for the project is attracting traditional film studios or streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime Video to distribute the documentary.
“We plan to have a variety of partners and producers, traditional and crypto-native alike, in order to make this the absolute best piece of art the internet has ever seen,” tridog said.
“We want the people to know, to understand how a simple photograph of a dog has spread joy and happiness around the world, bringing people together for hijinks again and again.”
The Rise of Dogecoin – From a Meme to a Billion-Dollar Cryptocurrency
Dogecoin was originally created as a joke in late 2013 by two software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer.
The Dogecoin code was initially copied from an earlier now-defunct cryptocurrency called Luckycoin, which was a fork of Litecoin (LTC).
However, to everyone’s surprise, Dogecoin was a near-instant success. The meme cryptocurrency gained tremendous popularity on sites such as Reddit, where it has been used as a tipping currency.
When Dogecoin was just 2-weeks old, it reached more transactions per day than Bitcoin. Moreover, within the first month, there were over one million unique visitors to its website.
The Dogecoin community has also played a key role in the success of the meme cryptocurrency.
For example, in 2014 the Dogecoin community raised 26.5 million Dogecoin (worth around USD $30,000.00 at the time) to send the Jamaican bobsled team to the Sochi Winter Olympics.
However, the cryptocurrency started to gain massive popularity after Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk openly supported it in 2019. “Dogecoin might be my fav cryptocurrency,” Musk tweeted in April 2019. “It’s pretty cool.”
As of late, some businesses, including cinema chain AMC Entertainment Holdings, have adopted Dogecoin as a means of payment for certain goods, further adding utility to the meme-based cryptocurrency.
At the time of writing, Dogecoin is trading at $0.085, up by around 4% over the past day. The token currently has a market cap of around $11.9 billion, ranking as the eighth largest cryptocurrency in the world.
