Dogecoin is a popular cryptocurrency project that’s generally seen as the original meme coin. Dogecoin made its debut in late 2013 and quickly grabbed the community’s attention with its humorous and ironic take on the cryptocurrency space.  

While the creators of Dogecoin didn’t expect their project to amount to very much, DOGE has a market capitalization of roughly $9.7 billion less than a decade after its launch. At its very peak, the DOGE market cap reached a whopping $87 billion, which is definitely no joke. 

Dogecoin has managed to outlast countless cryptocurrency projects that have been launched over the years with lofty goals of transforming the financial system or even the way we live our lives with blockchain technology. DOGE has survived multiple cryptocurrency bear markets already, although its price has obviously displayed massive fluctuations over the years.

In this article, we will be assuming that Dogecoin will stick around over the long term and consider some of the long-term scenarios for the Dogecoin price. We’ll look at Dogecoin price predictions for 2040 and 2050 based on common investing benchmarks. 

Before we continue, however, let’s explore Dogecoin’s price history to get a better idea of where the DOGE market currently stands.  

Dogecoin price history

After its launch in late 2013, Dogecoin saw a strong price decline in 2014 and 2015, when the price of DOGE stayed under $0.0005. In fact, DOGE remained below this price level until the first half of 2017. 

Dogecoin surpassed the $0.0010 price level in May 2017, and displayed a lot of volatility throughout the year before embarking on a massive rally that culminated at a price of around $0.0180 in January of 2018. 

The Dogecoin price crashed in 2018, but still retained a lot of the gains it had made in the 2017 bull run. In the cryptocurrency bear market that followed the 2017 bull run, DOGE found a bottom at about $0.00121 in March 2020. This bottom was reached during the market-wide crypto crash which was induced by fears surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The Dogecoin price returned above 1 cent again in January 2021, but this rally didn’t quite reach the 10 cent milestone. 

This happened in the spring of 2021, when Dogecoin displayed one of the most explosive price increases we’ve ever seen from a major cryptocurrency and reached an all-time high of $0.73.

The sudden increase in demand for DOGE was driven in large part by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk publicly expressing his support for Dogecoin.

This rally was perhaps unsurprisingly followed by a sharp correction. In the months following the peak at $0.73, DOGE crashed all the way down to $0.20, where it temporarily followed support. After a period of consolidation, the price of DOGE began to decline again and bottomed out at around $0.054 in June 2021. 

Overall, DOGE hasn’t produced a major bounce from this bottom, as the coin is changing hands at a price of about $0.071 at the time of writing. However, given the coin’s price history, it wouldn’t be impossible for DOGE to reach $1 at some point in the future during a bull run in the crypto market.

Dogecoin price prediction for 2040

In order to make a long term Dogecoin price prediction, we need to choose some benchmarks for yearly growth. Using Dogecoin’s historical performance isn’t of much help here, as DOGE’s average yearly growth over the past 5 years has been a massive 837%, primarily thanks to the incredible rally the coin displayed in 2021. 

It would be unreasonable to expect that Dogecoin will continue growing at such a rate over the long term, especially since DOGE now has a significant market capitalization and a larger amount of money needs to be invested in Dogecoin for big price moves to occur. 

When trying to predict where an asset’s price could go more a decade from now, it’s perhaps best to use mainstream investments as a benchmark. We have to keep in mind that cryptocurrencies have only been around for about a decade and there’s no telling how they will perform when we’re looking at decades instead of years.

So, let’s take the average yearly return of the S&P 500 index as our benchmark. The S&P 500 is the most popular measure of the U.S. equities market, and many types of investments are compared to the S&P 500 to determine whether they are overperforming or underperforming.

Since its inception, the S&P 500 index has grown by an average of roughly 11.8% per year. Let’s plug this rate of our return into our crypto profit calculator to see what the price of Dogecoin would be in 2040 if it grew at this rate.

Under this assumption (11.8% average yearly growth), the DOGE price prediction for 2040 would be $0.52, an increase of about 7.3x from the current price.

Cryptocurrencies are risky investments, and crypto investors usually expect higher returns than the S&P 500 if things go right. This time, let’s choose a more ambitious benchmark, which is the average growth rate of Bitcoin over the last 5 years (22.2). 

So, how high will Dogecoin go if it grows at this rate? If we assume a 22.2% average yearly growth rate for Dogecoin until 2040, the price of DOGE would be $2.62, or an increase of 36.9x compared to the current price.  

Dogecoin price prediction for 2050

Let’s use the same benchmarks to consider a Dogecoin price prediction for 2050. Assuming the S&P 500’s average yearly growth rate of 11.8%, the DOGE price would be $1.61 in 2050. This would represent a 22.6x increase compared to the current price.

If we use Bitcoin’s average growth rate over the past 5 years (22.2%) as the benchmark, the price of Dogecoin would reach a whopping $19.4 by 2050. Such a Dogecoin price target hardly seems possible, as it would imply a $2.57 trillion market capitalization for DOGE (assuming the current supply of 132.6 billion coins).

At the time of writing, the world’s most valuable company, Apple, has a market capitalization of just below $2.5 trillion, so it’s not really reasonable to expect a meme cryptocurrency to reach such heights.

Dogecoin price prediction for 2023-2024

Now that we’ve taken a look at some long-term DOGE forecasts using the growth of other assets as a benchmark, let’s check out what the Dogecoin prediction on CoinCodex is forecasting over a shorter time period. 

The Dogecoin price prediction for 2023 is currently negative, as the price prediction algorithm on CoinCodex is expecting the price of DOGE to decline quite substantially throughout the year. According to the forecast, DOGE is expected to find a bottom at around $0.024 in July 2023. 

However, the forecast is much more optimistic for 2024. The price prediction is currently anticipating that Dogecoin will rise in a big rally in early 2024, which could see DOGE increase all the way up to $0.58. This would represent an increase of 8.1x compared to the current price.

Long-term catalysts for DOGE

Of course, things will need to go right if Dogecoin is to stay around and grow over the long term. It’s difficult to make a long-term case for Dogecoin using fundamentals, as the coin is primarily around due to its meme appeal and not because of its underlying technology. So, is Dogecoin a good investment for the long term?

Currently, the ace up Dogecoin’s sleeve is Elon Musk, who continues to be a fan of Dogecoin and occasionally mentions it on his Twitter account. This provides a level of publicity that most cryptocurrency projects can only dream about. However, there could also be a significant volatility in the DOGE markets if Elon Musk changes his mind on Dogecoin.

The Dogecoin Foundation is funding development of the Dogecoin protocol through various initiatives. For example, the Dogecoin Core development fund has been established to provide rewards to developers that contribute to the Dogecoin Core software.

Another potential boon for Dogecoin’s future is that there have been some discussions about moving Dogecoin from Proof-of-Work to a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism. This would not only make Dogecoin much more environmentally friendly, but it would also provide an incentive for long-term holding because DOGE stakers could earn some extra coins.    

The bottom line—Is Dogecoin going up over the long term?

If you’re investing in crypto and looking for cryptocurrencies to hold over the long term, DOGE is certainly not the worst candidate. Dogecoin has displayed impressive staying power so far, outlasting countless cryptocurrency projects that had big ambitions and attempted to make technological breakthroughs.

However, the light-hearted nature of the Dogecoin project is a double-edged sword, as DOGE doesn’t really have strong fundamentals to fall back upon if the public loses interest in Dogecoin and the market sentiment turns negative.