The Unintended Success Story of the Most Expensive Joke of All Time
Jackson Palmer built Dogecoin with a friend to poke fun at the crypto space.
Jackson Palmer created Dogecoin with a friend to poke fun at the crypto space. Meanwhile, DOGE is worth billions. The story of a fierce crypto critic.
A token supply of 100 billion, increasing by five billion each year, "Comic Sans" as the official font, the face of the famous Shiba Inu "Doge" who was the internet’s most famous meme in its heyday, and a development team that clearly knew little about crypto: Dogecoin, the first meme cryptocurrency, created in 2013, was almost impossible to take seriously at the start. But DOGE has since even broken into the top ten most valuable cryptocurrencies, briefly surpassed US$1 thanks to a popular TikTok trend, and hit a peak of US$89 billion in May of last year.
No one expected this kind of success, certainly not the friendly founders of Dogecoin, Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus. But that’s the punchline of their joke: the nearly inexhaustible token supply and the five-billion-tokens-per-year addition. Meme coins play an important role in the crypto space and democratize the (decentralized) financial world. That’s at least what their fans claim. With low transaction costs and high speed, the cryptocurrency is also affectionately dubbed "Bitcoin for microtransactions".
The fact that the meme-loving richest man in the world, Elon Musk, named himself a protector (his words: "dogefather"), lifted the “joke” onto the Olympus of cryptocurrencies. And Jackson Palmer? He keeps poking fun at the crypto space.
It’s a matter of principle for him
While the original MemeCoin has been copied thousands of times and was largely responsible for the success of altcoin projects like the many Doge offshoots (Floki Inu, Baby Doge, Shiba Inu, etc.) and other "animal tokens" (like ApeCoin and its NFT collection Bored Ape Yacht Club), Jackson Palmer has largely turned his back on the crypto space.
In fact, from the start he was convinced blockchain technology would matter and wanted to help with Dogecoin. The idea was to make it easier for newcomers to get started with crypto using plain language and a supportive community.
But Palmer had already changed his mind by 2015: Bitcoin hacks and numerous scams shook his trust in the crypto sector. The DOGE community fell victim to a multi-million dollar attack in late 2014, and venture capital flowed unchecked into hollow projects. All of this led the programmer to quit. He handed development to a team of trusted colleagues and donated his entire Dogecoin stake to a good cause, as he explained in a 2018 Vice comment. Since then his view of crypto has soured even more.
"Right-wing, hyper-capitalist technology"
Although Palmer hung up his blockchain developer hat long ago, he never stops sharing his critical view on crypto on his Twitter handle @ummjackson. When asked if he would ever definitively return to cryptocurrency, he answered in 2021: "After years of study I’ve concluded that cryptocurrencies are inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalist tech designed mainly to enrich their supporters’ wealth through a combination of tax evasion, reduced regulatory oversight, and artificially induced scarcity."
Despite the claimed "decentralization," Palmer said, "The crypto industry is controlled by a powerful cartel of rich players who have long taken over many of the same institutions associated with the centralized financial system they claim to replace."
On paper, or more accurately in a ten-part Twitter thread, Palmer published this takedown of the crypto space in July last year.
A month later the Dogecoin Foundation announced its reorganization. This time with crypto heavyweights like Vitalik Buterin and a representative of Elon Musk. The self-imposed goals of the Dogecoin board: further develop the Dogecoin blockchain, support the Dogecoin ecosystem, and strengthen the community.
From fun to serious
At the same time, Tesla CEO Musk can’t help pointing out the benefits of Memecoin. Even a spaceflight funded by his company SpaceX is in the works. It would be the first crypto spaceflight ever.
There’s no denying that Jackson Palmer’s crypto joke has long since become serious. And the venture capitalists, the rich and powerful he clashed with last year? They’ve long been part of the DOGE ecosystem.
Despite all this, the pragmatic developer keeps cracking jokes: Palmer recently reworked Crypto.com’s ad campaign and its slogan "Fortune favors the brave" to "Fortune favors the celebrities paid in US dollars." Including a GIF of Crypto.com brand ambassador Matt Damon, whose face has probably convinced one or two investors to enter the market.
