Dogecoin Sees Highest Transactions Count Ever Due DRC20 Madness

The Bitcoin Inscriptions craze is spreading to Dogecoin. The number of transactions that the Dogecoin blockchain has had to process in the last few days have risen to an all-time high, mainly due to the new DRC20 token standard.

DRC20 tokens on Dogecoin are an experimental token standard that works similarly to the minting and transfer of fungible tokens via the Ordinals protocol on the Bitcoin blockchain. Technically, this is possible because Dogecoin was created by inventor Billy Markus forking Lucky Coin, which is itself a fork of Bitcoin.

In the last 7 days, the number of transactions recorded on the Dogecoin blockchain have skyrocketed. Before the DRC20 token standard was created, the Dogecoin network recorded no more than 23,754 transactions per day throughout May, according to data from BitInfoCharts. Last Saturday, May 13, Dogecoin saw a staggering 628,209 transactions.

To put that in perspective: The highest number ever recorded before this new alltime-high was on December 20, 2013, when the network processed just 201,440 transactions. In comparison, the total number of transactions that took place on Saturday (628,209) is more than three times the historic high from 2013.

The madness first started rolling on Tuesday, May 9, when the transaction count doubled to over 40,000 and remained at that level over the next three days. On 11 May (Thursday) the Cambrian explosion occurred when the number of transactions rose above 450,000 for the first time. The sudden surge in transactions is mainly due to the registration process used to create the “Doginals” and DRC20 tokens.

#Dogecoin transactions are skyrocketing. New ATH is 3x the previous (Dec. 2013)

Why? The new DRC20 Tokens and "Doginals" pic.twitter.com/20DXWjYGTh

— Jake Simmons (@realJakeSimmons) May 15, 2023

In response to the emergence of DRC20 tokens, many members of the community enthusiastically began exploring and minting these tokens. However, Dogecoin core maintainer Patrick Lodder has little enthusiasm for the new trend. “Json doginals minting scams,” remarked Lodder via Twitter, adding with regard to the poor programming:

“let’s push json” “let’s keep spaces” “oh and let’s keep newlines”

lmao morons.

When asked if there could be congestion in transaction times, similar to Bitcoin, Lodder stated:

Yes, but it currently translates to a ~5-10 block wait. This is because they overpay fees too (10.3x recommended min fee) so you’ll get to get priority over these at 11x min fee (0.11 DOGE/kB). Ah, so higher cost per as well. hmm.

But Lodder rejected the necessity of a fork, saying that DRC20 tokens simply increase fees “a little bit”. In addition, the Dogecoin core maintainer also disagreed with the need for a “spam filter” (as has been discussed for Bitcoin) and shared a tip: “Just raise your fees a little now, and if you don’t like this, you can simply raise your dust limit so that you don’t relay these transactions – saves bandwidth.”

At press time, the DOGE price stood at $0.07271.