A lot has happened in the past year since Dogechain launched its mainnet. Our community has grown immensely and the team has managed to build a solid infrastructure for Dogecoin utility.

This article will guide you through all the major milestones of the Dogechain network and its achievements during the first year after its launch.

Foreword

As an emerging industry, blockchain remains in continuous evolution. In the past few years, thousands of new actors have entered the scene, each trying to bring their set of innovations to the space.

However, despite countless innovations in blockchain tech, the past couple of years have been nothing short of challenging. Almost every participant in the tech has felt the hardships of the long crypto winter. The collapse of major players in the markets has undone years of progress and sent a large number of projects back to the drawing board.

Despite all adversities, teams jumped at the chance to start building new narratives that would remodel the industry. After all, bear markets are for building, or at least, that’s how the saying goes in blockchain.

In this regard, Dogechain came out as a glimmer of hope for many participants in the industry. In a time of hardship, it brought a lighthearted approach to the industry by following the Dogecoin ethos and opening the way for a genuine economy based on memes.

Dogechain — From Idea to Reality

Dogecoin, just like the dog breed that it’s based on, is a pretty resilient species. Nearly a decade in the markets, the original meme cryptocurrency has seen its fair share of market cycles, bearish and bullish. And after each cycle, DOGE has come out stronger, with an even larger community and higher market cap.

However, this industry is ever-changing. Together with the technology, the user base has evolved and expects additional utility from crypto. With the advent of smart contracts, even meme tokens have been able to participate in the Web3 revolution and access DeFi, NFTs, and blockchain games.

And yet, Dogecoin was left out of these novel use cases due to its limited smart compatibility. To remedy this, a community of long-term Dogecoin supporters gathered and ideated around making Dogecoin a stronger, future-proof cryptocurrency.

These industry-leading thinking heads, with multiple successful projects under their belt, felt that the DOGE community deserved more for supporting the original memecoin. Thus, the idea of an EVM blockchain using DOGE as gas was born.

This “Dogechain” would allow Dogecoin holders to plug their coins into a smart contract-capable blockchain. Consequently, Dogechain provides a platform for superpowering Dogecoin and using it in Web3 applications such as DeFi, NFT minting and trading, and blockchain games.

The ultimate goal is to provide more utility for DOGE and allow it to compete with cutting-edge technologies in the industry.

Polygon Edge as the Building Framework

Considering the connections of the core team with builders within the industry, there were many stack options to start building the Dogechain blockchain.

At the time that our developers were considering different alternatives, Polygon offered a great solution for building standalone chains with their Edge technology. What’s more, building on Polygon Edge would allow Dogechain to be eventually integrated with the Polygon Supernets interoperability framework.

Consequently, Dogechain could seamlessly integrate and interchange assets from other Supernets chains in the future.

Other benefits of using Polygon Edge as the underlying framework for Dogechain include:

EVM compatibility, meaning tokens on the Dogechain are created using the ERC-20 protocol and pluggable into the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem.
It uses IBFT PoS, which functions on a mechanism of validators confirming transactions and block creation. This consensus engine is both fast and scalable, allowing Dogechain to remain sustainable and eco-friendly even with mass usage.
It boasts smart contract capability, opening the possibility for Dogecoin holders to pay for gas with $DOGE for dApps deployed on the chain.

The result is a scalable and cost-effective solution for both builders and users.

Launch Preparation and Community Building

Once the Dogechain idea started to materialize and the final product was close to release, it was time to start building the hype.

The Dogechain marketing team spearheaded by Lunar Digital Assets used its experience in the industry to build a strong community of followers.

Moreover, through multiple educational campaigns, the Dogechain team managed to convey the benefits of this new EVM chain for Dogecoin holders. And by leveraging these advantages to the Dogecoin community, Dogechain managed to build up a strong following prior to the launch.

In addition, Dogechain’s socials ran a huge engagement campaign with a $30,000 prize pool, dubbed the “Grand a Day”. Quizzes, meme contests, video creation, and friend recruitment, were just a few of these contests that gathered an inspired community of followers.

Dogechain Chained Mainnet and DOGE Bridge Launch

The first major step in providing utility to Dogecoin was the launch of the Dogechain mainnet which occurred on August 2, 2022. This marked the beginning of the Dogechain network as we all know it, providing an EVM-compatible smart contract network where DOGE could be used as gas.

Simultaneously with the mainnet, the native Dogecoin bridge went live, allowing users to bridge in their DOGE and obtain wrapped DOGE on the chain. This would allow them to pay for the (negligible) transaction fees on the network but also start participating in the DeFi ecosystem on Dogechain.

In less than a week, hundreds of applications were already available, where users could plug in their Dogecoin and start trading it on multiple DEXes, mint NFTs, or create their own DOGE-powered projects.

Dogechain Early Shibes Airdrop + Monthly Burns

Probably the most significant community-building campaign prior to the $DC token launch was the promise of the Early Shibes Airdrop.

During this campaign, no less than 3% of the total supply of the soon-to-be-released $DC tokens would be airdropped to anyone bridging Dogecoin once the mainnet went live.

This allowed the network to grow significantly in a record amount of time. In the first weeks, the number of users reached over 200,000 and its TVL shot up to 300 million DOGE bridged at its peak.

Dogechain $DC Token Launch

Finally, after running the mainnet for 3 whole weeks, the time to release the native token of the Dogechain network had come.

On August 24, 2022, the token generation event created one trillion $DC tokens, and distributed them to different allocations depicted in the tokenomics.

This token has two main use cases — governance and staking incentives.

As a community-first project, a major portion of the initial supply was distributed to early supporters. At launch, 15% of the Early Shibes Airdrop was distributed to everyone who had bridged DOGE, proportional to their bridged amount. The rest of the airdrop would be distributed in the following 12 months.

The token was initially listed on three decentralized exchanges:

Uniswap on Ethereum, as an ERC20 token.
Quickswap and Fraxswap on Dogechain, as a DOG20 token.

Quickly enough, the business development work done by the Dogechain team in the background came into effect. The $DC token was listed on multiple major centralized exchanges including:

Kucoin
Gate
Mexc
Huobi, among many others.

This allowed users less familiar with the decentralized finance ecosystem to still be able to support the project and use it as a speculative asset.

Dogechain’s Stellar Early Growth Metrics

These early and lightning-fast developments brought some of the most incredible numbers for Dogechain. Considering the network was launched amidst some of the worst periods of the bear market, these figures stood out as a genuine achievement during these trying times for the industry.

Some of these early-day milestones for August and September 2022 include:

✅ +17.9 Million transactions

✅ +221k Wallets

✅ +332 Million $DOGE Bridged over

✅ +100 dApps building on chain

✅ + $57 Million peak 24-hour volume on $DC

✅ $DC listed on 10 Centralised exchanges

✅ Trending on multiple socials

✅ Trending on CoinGecko

✅ Earlier adopters received an incredible #airdrop

✅ Surpassed #Ethereum, #Cosmos & other L1s in 24h Transactions

An incredible growth that didn’t leave Dogechain unnoticed in the crypto space.

First Twitter Spaces — Sep 2, 2022

September 2022 marked the beginning of the famous weekly Dogechain Roundtable Twitter Spaces, currently at its 50th edition.

In these discussions, the community was able to meet the core contributors on the Dogechain network firsthand. This allowed the team to build a trustworthy and authentic relationship with the Dogechain’s supporters.

Moreover, these spaces provided users with a channel to discover new projects launching on the chain and discuss their views about the directions the project would take in the future.

Over the course of the year, these spaces have proven to be an immensely popular community-building tool. Every Friday, they allow thousands of users to tune in to get the latest info about Dogechain, upcoming developments, and crucial integrations. More than that, they have become a great place to hang out with the awesome Dogechain community.

Dogegress.dog Governance Platform Launch

On September 21, 2022, the Dogechain team released the dogegress.dog governance platform, where users could utilize their $DC tokens to vote on various proposals.

This marked the first step in providing utility to the $DC token in addition to being a simple speculative asset.

This governance platform would prove vital to the major changes in the $DC tokenomics and general direction of the Dogechain project.

Further down the road, the platform will also enable all project builders to create their own proposals. Dogegress will support all the tokens running on the Dogechain mainnet, providing ecosystem participants with an inclusive governance platform for their projects.

The Great Burn of 2022

Some of the hottest talking points in the early days of Dogechain were the initial tokenomics of the $DC token. A large part of the community provided an abundance of feedback and concerns regarding the total supply of 1 trillion $DC.

To better align with the long-term incentives of all members of the Dogechain community, the Dogechain team pushed forward a proposal to reduce the total supply of the $DC token by 80%. These 800 billion tokens were valued at more than $2 billion at that time.

After holding a vote on Dogegress.dog, with an overwhelmingly positive response from the community of $DC holders, the Great Burn of 2022 was carried out on October 31, 2022.

During this historic event, 800 billion $DC tokens from the unreleased supply were burned and proportionally permanently removed across all the allocations.

Proof of Burn 👉 https://bit.ly/3SSShSR

The Great Burn of 2022 provided much better optics for the $DC token in the long term and allowed all community members to align on the same page.

Introducing the veDC Model and $DC Staking

On November 14, 2022, a long-awaited feature of the Dogechain network was made available to the community — the veDC staking model.

To keep the tokenomics of the $DC token viable for the long term, the Dogechain team opted for a vote escrow model with predetermined timelocks. In this model, validators and delegators cannot directly stake their $DC tokens. Instead, they need to go through the veDC model and lock $DC for fixed periods to receive $veDC tokens.

This model allows users to receive $veDC tokens, in proportion to the length of their lockup time. The longer the lockup time, the more $veDC they receive, providing them with higher staking rewards and more voting power in governance proposals.

This model was implemented to ensure long-term commitment from both validators and delegators. The exponential increase of rewards incentivizes longer timelocks, which takes tokens out of circulation and reduces selling pressure.

You can read more information about this model in our Dogechain Staking 101 blog post.

Shibes Ambassador Program

Although hype can create a great deal of momentum for blockchain projects, sustained growth requires a strong community. For this reason, In November 2022, the Dogechain Ambassador Program was created.

This allowed the most ardent followers to participate in an all-supportive program that gave them the opportunity to get closer to the Dogechain team.

These Ambassadors have since been spreading the good word about Dogechain’s benefits and DOGE utility all over the crypto space. They have become an invaluable resource in maintaining a strong community by helping newcomers and keeping followers up to date with the latest developments on the chain.

Dogechain Grants Program — Round 1

We can safely declare that Dogechain is a community project, created by DOGE lovers, for everyone that wants to get more use out of their Dogecoin.

Hence, the large majority of dApps running on the chain have been created by community members who want to provide added utility for their peers.

Launched in December 2022, the Dogechain Grants Program, is one of the critical ways for the team to help support and grow the Dogechain ecosystem.

After reviewing hundreds of applicants, the team has handpicked some of the best, and most trustworthy projects building on Dogechain.

In this first round of grants, 12 projects were granted $DC tokens to help them continue to build on the chain. These projects varied widely in scope, including DeFi products, NFTs, analytics, on-chain infrastructure, and games.

Battle of the Grants

To continue the incentives on building on Dogechain, the team initiated a community-driven contest for projects.

Launched in December 2022, the Battle of the Grants was a community-driven contest for projects that wished to grow their communities and be rewarded for it. It took place on Twitter and allowed any project building on Dogechain to participate.

The contest was held as a 4-round knockout model. Each round lasted one week, after which winners were announced and the next round began.

At the end of the program, 8 of the participants shared a $10,000 prize pool that would help immensely with their running costs.

The Battle of the Grants served project to engage communities and reward them for growing their own. Also, this competition proved to be a successful campaign for the community to do its part and help these projects grow. With their support, not only did they make their favorite projects more visible but also helped them win a significant boost to their budget.

Build-A-Doge Workshop

One of the main volume drivers for the Dogechain network in the early days was memecoin trading. In a matter of days, thousands of projects launched their tokens, contributing to the huge success of Dogechain.

As the chain of memes and dreams, memetoken trading is a major product-market fit for Dogechain. Released in April 2023, the new Build-A-Doge Workshop was launched to provide a streamlined platform for launching DOG-20 tokens, using smart contracts tested by the Dogechain dev team.

This no-code platform allows projects to launch their DOG-20 tokens easily and focus on building their communities. Moreover, the standard smart contract template for these tokens ensures that there is no hidden malicious code allowing for 100% buy/sell taxes or honeypot rugpulls.

As a result, dozens of new meme tokens were launched on the chain, creating new communities and providing a home for a genuine memeconomy.

Tiered Burn

In May 2023, the Dogechain team put up a new governance proposal that was aimed at improving the $DC token optics.

The community of veDC holders was able to vote for a Tiered Burn of the unreleased supply.

The burn tiers were correlated to the amount of $DC locked in the vote-escrow model (veDC) as follows:

Tier 1–20% of $DC circulating supply locked — 10% burn
Tier 2–30% of $DC circulating supply locked — 15% burn
Tier 3–40% of $DC circulating supply locked — 20% burn
Tier 4–50% of $DC circulating supply locked — 25% burn (max)

Following a community vote on dogegress.dog, the proposal was accepted, which initiated the lockup timeframe for the snapshot.

Finally, the snapshot of the tiers was taken on July 24, 2023, which allowed the community to reach the 2nd tier of the burn, with over 30% circulating $DC locked.

As a result, 30 billion $DC tokens were burned, lowering the total supply of tokens to a final 170 billion $DC.

Proof of Burn 👉 https://explorer.dogechain.dog/tx/0x8ee118fffc41c3bd6c8f920919cbdde54ce791ae8fb270def3e283cfc0cc8d32

First DAO Vote — Meme Revolution

As stated multiple times before, Dogechain was created with a community-first mindset, where holders will take part in the major decisions on the chain.

For this reason, the Dogechaion dev team upgraded the dogegress.dog platform to be able to receive multiple votes for multiple proposals. This became incredibly useful for DAO votes, where veDC holders are able to vote for different projects for the DAO to invest in.

Occurring in July 2023, the Meme Revolution was the first of such DAO “shark tank” type of governance model. The Dogechain core contributors envisioned a community-driven approach that would instigate a genuine meme token revolution on our chain of memes and dreams.

During the Meme Revolution, projects would compete on socials for clout in a first round of elimination. After passing the elimination round, the DAO would invest in 10 of the participating meme tokens, in proportion to the number of votes they received on dogegress.dog.

Following the vote conclusion, the DAO would invest $20,000 in these tokens, over a period of 2 months, proportionally to their vote percentage.

The winning meme projects were:

#1 $DTOOLS — DogeTools — 48.76%

#2 $TDH — The Drugged Huskies Token — 26.13%

#3 $FUCKPEPE — FuckPepe Token — 17.71%

#4 $DOGEASTRO — Astro Doge Token — 2.77%

#5 $KIBBY — Kibby Token — 1.03%

#6 $KONRA — Konra Token — 0.54%

#7 $BBYODA — Baby Yoda Token- 0.91%

#8 $GRIMACE — Grimace Token — 0.79%

#9 $WAT — Wojak Ass Token — 0.49%

#10 $BDC — Buddy Dogechain Token — 0.47%

The goal of this initiative was to:

Provide an appealing ecosystem for communities and project leaders to launch their tokens on Dogechain.
Increase activity and transaction volume on the network.
Empower existing communities on Dogechain through social boosting and DAO investment.
Provide new opportunities for both projects and users.
Inject liquidity on the chain from eager liquidity providers that want to participate in the Dogechain memeconomy.

Native $DC ERC20>DOG20 converter

In an unfortunate turn of events, Multichain, one of the main third-party bridges for Dogechain was compromised. The Multichain Bridge suffered an exploit on July 6, 2023, tainting the ERC20 $DC tokens issued by that bridge.

This caused the ERC20 $DC to be considered useless/worthless as they wouldn’t be able to be traded on Uniswap or deposited on centralized exchanges.

To remedy this issue, the Dogechain team released a token converter that allows users and institutions to redeem ERC20 $DC 1:1 for DOG20 $DC.

In the conversion process:

The ERC20 $DC tokens are destroyed.
The DOG20 $DC tokens will be provided by the Loyal Shibes allocation (address: 0xBce77b0d91e98E4524E74Fd378A3af5c9B94528e). No new tokens would be created for the conversion.

Although the situation was quite unfortunate, there is a silver lining to the Multichain failure. It pushed the community to bridge over their assets back on Dogechain, providing them with multiple benefits and use cases.

The ERC20 $DC tokens were bridged at launch to provide better exposure to the asset and reach a larger user base. These tokens always had a single use case as a speculative asset and couldn’t be used in the Dogechain ecosystem.

By deprecating the ERC20 $DC tokens and converting them to DOG20, users were able to recover their utility as speculative assets but also access more use cases such as staking and governance.

Wrapping Up Dogechain’s First Year

The first year of Dogechain’s existence has been an incredible year of growth and continuous building. In such a short amount of time, the team has managed to provide a fully functional EVM chain for using Dogecoin as gas.

Even with a few hiccups here and there, the team has overcome the multiple challenges that come with building a brand new chain, created with a vision to onboard millions of users.

And all of this has been made possible by the awesome community that keeps supporting the team and the builders on the chain. The Shibes are strong together and have shown time and time again their resilience to adversity.

With that said, the Dogechain team doesn’t stop here and has some incredible updates coming on its roadmap. Improving the blockchain infrastructure, providing better liquidity flows, and working towards decentralization are just a few of the things that are coming up.

So, here’s to many more years of building and providing utility for DOGE 🐶🥂🐶

And remember, Do Only Good Everyday.

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