After the Ethereum network switched to proof-of-stake on September 15, Dogecoin (DOGE), which was based on a meme, is now the second largest proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrency by market cap.
Bitcoin (BTC) is still worth a lot more than Dogecoin’s $7.83 billion market cap, but the popular memecoin is still well ahead of Ethereum Classic (ETC) (with a market cap of $4.69 billion), Litecoin (LTC) ($4.01 billion), and Monero (XMR) ($2.65 billion).
Market capitalization is used to rank POW-based cryptocurrencies.
One Dogecoin fan seemed surprised that Dogecoin had become the second largest Proof-of-Work (PoW) cryptocurrency. They said, “Who would have thought this would happen? Congrats #Dogefam.”
But not everyone liked what she said. In response to a tweet about the news, one Twitter user asked how people could take the crypto industry seriously when a memecoin was so close to the top spot. This showed how important it was to hide “useless coins” from the public.
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But Dogecoin may soon have to compete with ETHPoW, the Ethereum PoW hard fork chain that will keep mining, according to the official Twitter account of ETHPoW, which is currently worth $13.64.
The switch from PoW to PoS on Ethereum may have put more pressure on other cryptocurrency networks that use PoW to switch to a more stable consensus mechanism.
In a statement to Asian Trade, Lachlan Feeney, founder and CEO of the Australian blockchain development company Labrys, said that “the pressure is on Bitcoin now to justify the PoW system over the long term.”
He also said that “reluctance to make its own move to PoS will be very big.”
The Ethereum co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, who is also an advisor to the Dogecoin Foundation, suggested that Dogecoin should switch to proof-of-stake in September 2021. Since then, the Dogecoin Foundation has been thinking about making the change.
The Dogecoin Foundation released its “Dogecoin Trailmap” in December 2021. This plan was to build a “community staking” version of Dogecoin that worked like PoS.
The Dogecoin Foundation said, “All Dogecoin users would be able to stake their DOGE and get extra tokens for helping the network.”
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But since then, not much has changed. The Dogecoin website still lists it as a “proposal,” so not much has changed.
At the time of this writing, a DOGE is worth $0.06.
