From decrypt by Mat Di Salvo

Forget a Bitcoin reserve—what about a Dogecoin government stash? 

That’s the idea of the former-joke-now-serious-cryptocurrency’s founder, Billy Markus, who floated the idea on Twitter (aka X). 

“Why not national Dogecoin reserve tho [sic],” he wrote on the platform Friday.

why not national dogecoin reserve tho https://t.co/jRh0b3rG7j

— Shibetoshi Nakamoto (@BillyM2k) November 15, 2024

Markus was responding to a post by prediction market Kalshi about bettors seeing an increasing chance of President-elect Donald Trump creating a strategic Bitcoin reserve.

Trump previously said that when in power, he would let the U.S. government buy up Bitcoin as a reserve asset. The U.S. already has assets like land, Treasuries, and gold in its reserves. 

Republican Senator Cynthia Lummis from Wyoming exclusively spoke to Decrypt this month about how such a plan would work. 

  As Bitcoin gains momentum, floating such an idea isn’t as crazy as it sounds. With a market cap of $1.8 trillion, the orange coin is currently the seventh-biggest asset in the world, after this month overtaking both silver and Saudi Arabia’s petroleum and natural gas company, Saudi Aramco.

Dogecoin (DOGE), on the other hand, is the sixth-biggest cryptocurrency—and has a market cap of just $55 billion. The coin was created as a joke and is based on a popular Internet meme of a Shiba Inu dog. 

Still, it gained momentum in 2020-2021 after Tesla CEO and upcoming U.S. government employee Elon Musk constantly talked about how much he liked the virtual coin. The tech entrepreneur and world’s richest man has also (seemingly) seriously spoken about how the asset could be used for payments. 

And Wall Street analysts told Decrypt that it might not be long before the asset becomes available to traditional investors via an exchange-traded fund (ETF). Meanwhile, crypto analysts also told Decrypt that DOGE could easily smash through its all-time price record from 2021, with plenty of room to run. 

Things are suddenly getting very serious with the leading meme coin. But until a Bitcoin strategic reserve actually becomes reality, the notion of a Dogecoin one is likely to remain little more than a funny idea. Stranger things have happened in crypto, though.