In late 2013, a software engineer named Jackson Palmer, who was working at Adobe at the time,

decided to lampoon the burgeoning digital currency market that was dominated by Bitcoin

and increasingly flooded with other similar-ish offerings, often called altcoins.

Among them, such standouts as World Coin, Anon Coin, Mega Coin, and BBQ

coin. And he did this by creating a splash page for a not-real digital asset of his own,

which he jokingly called Dogecoin. The name of this faux coin was derived from a meme that featured a Shiba Inu

dog, Comic Sans typography, and a specific type of misspelling that became associated with the

meme. Faces like much wow and so amaze allude to the idea that this text represents the internal monologue of this dog

that is looking at the camera awkwardly, which I know doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you've

never seen this meme. But the upside is that the fake altcoin, this software engineer

advertised on this fake landing page featured the face of this

much-beloved meme-worthy Shiba-inu dog, and the name Doge, which is what the dog became known

as due to the aforementioned misspellings that accompany these memes, became part of the fake

alt-coins moniker, doge coin.

Another software engineer named Billy Marcus, who was working for IBM at the time,

saw the splash page for this fake alt coin, loved the concept, and reached out to Palmer

to see if he was keen to make this joke coin into an actual digital asset,

one that could be designed so that it reached a much wider audience than Bitcoin,

despite having many of these same attributes.

Marcus had already been working on a digital coin that at the time he called Bells,

named after an in-game currency from Nintendo's Animal Crossing video game.

The Bells concept wasn't really getting much traction though, and he thought it would be

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