After Ethereum’s transition to the proof-of-stake (PoS) protocol, Dogecoin is now officially the second-largest proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrency – second only to Bitcoin. This is in terms of market cap, DOGE $7.83 billion.
The memecoin is comfortably ahead of the third place PoW cryptocurrency Ethereum Classic (ETC) which has a market cap of $4.69 billion, followed by Litecoin (LTC) at $4.01 billion and Monero (XMR) at $2.65 billion.
A Dogecoin enthusiast was in disbelief of the coin’s rise to become the second-largest PoW cryptocurrency. He said who could have thought that this would happen. There has been criticism as well. One Twitter user asked how people could take the crypto industry seriously with a meme coin so close to the top spot. He emphasized the need to remove useless coins from public view. Dogecoin will soon find itself in swift competition against ETHPoW – the Ethereum PoW hard fork chain that will continue mining.
The Merge may have added pressure on PoW-powered cryptocurrency networks to transition to a more sustainable consensus mechanism. Lachlan Feeney, the founder, and CEO of Labrys, believes the pressure is on now on Bitcoin to justify the PoW system over the long term. He said the reluctance to carry out its own transition to PoS will be huge.
Dogecoin has also been considering a shift to the PoS after initially hinting at it in September 2021 – this was put forth by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin who is also an advisor for the Dogecoin Foundation. The Foundation released the Dogecoin Trailmap in December 2021 which proposed to build a Dogecoin community staking version similar to PoS. It said such a move would allow Dogecoin users to stake their DOGE and get extra tokens for supporting the network.
But little progress has been made toward it.
