How to Invest in Dogecoin (2025)

tl;dr: Dogecoin can work as a currency but is highly speculative as an investment. Consider a small "fun money" position. It's not appropriate as a core holding for value investors.

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A dollar is a dollar. So is a euro or a renminbi. (Maybe a ruble isn't these days, but a ruble is still a ruble.)

We call these things currencies. They share a few key traits, and the most important is simple: you can reliably use them to pay for goods and services.

When does money become something else? When it's cryptocurrency: a digital unit not issued by a government that uses cryptography to verify transactions.

In practice, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin are digital currencies you can buy, sell, or use to pay for goods and services.

Are they worth investing in? That depends.

Everything You Wanted to Know about Cryptocurrency (but were afraid to ask)

As alluded to earlier, currency has several essential features.

It's durable, in the sense that it doesn't wear out meaningfully over time. Where a bushel of apples may rot or get chewed on by bugs, a pile of silver dollars stays a pile of silver dollars.

It's portable. You can fold up a cashier's check and put it in your pocket, but it's much harder to carry around a 300-acre golf course.

You can divide it into smaller amounts. You can represent a dollar in terms of four quarters, twenty nickels, a hundred pennies, ten dimes, two half-dollars, et cetera. You can make change for any transaction smaller than a dollar. Try doing that if you're paying for things with a single cow!

It's uniform or fungible. Unless you have one of those dollar bills with a funny drawing on it, one dollar bill is the same as any other. What if you're trying to pay someone in eggs, and they want ostrich eggs and you have duck eggs? Or they want free-range jumbo chicken eggs and you only have cage-free eggs?

It doesn't grow on trees, the supply is limited. This is why we don't use leaves as currency.

People accept it as payment. It does no good to be the world's top holder of little pieces of paper with the face of Emperor Norton on them unless you can buy a really good meal with them, for example.

Cryptocurrency addresses some of these things, but more importantly it has other characteristics.

It promotes non-reversible transactions. You can't spend the same dollar twice, but a sneaky criminal could forge a check and buy multiple physical goods before everyone figures out what happened.

It has a public ledger of transactions. While you can look at a coin and see the city where it was minted and the year of striking, you can't tie it all the way back to the moment it rolled off the conveyor belt. In cryptocurrency, every element of every transaction can always be traced back to its origins.

It's decentralized, in that there's no single entity responsible for managing the currency. There's no US Treasury printing money. There's a network of computers all working together to verify the state of the currency supply with every transaction.

With that said, cryptocurrency isn't always accepted as payment or durable in an important sense.

What is the Value of Cryptocurrency?

What is the value of a dollar? It's like the value of a gold or silver bar. It could increase or decrease over time, but the real value is what you can buy with it.

(Wait, a dollar can increase or decrease over time? Yes—that's deflation and inflation, among other things.)

Unlike a business, whose value you can estimate from free cash flow, a cryptocurrency's value depends on what others are willing to pay. Each unit is an entry in a public ledger; it only has market value when people trade it.

Should a value investor invest in cryptocurrency? Not as a big part of your portfolio. What if investing is the wrong way to think of crypto though?

For example, in June 2020, El Salvador voted to accept Bitcoin as legal currency, even using geothermal power to mine coins. The distinction between an investment and currency is nuanced, but if you think about an investment as "a store of value", investing in something you can pay taxes in is pretty useful.

Everything You Need to Know About Where Cryptocurrency Comes From

This is how Bitcoin and similar systems work.

Cryptocurrency is built on cryptography and distributed systems. Because coins are recorded in a public ledger replicated across many machines, it's essential to verify that each copy of the ledger is consistent and that no attacker can forge entries.

Mining uses computing work to secure the ledger; machines that do the work can earn newly created coins. This is how many cryptocurrencies enter circulation.

If you want to buy one of these coins, you'll have to buy it from someone who mined it at some point in the past.

Is it Smart to Mine Cryptocurrency?

The problems with mining cryptocurrency are:

• You're competing with lots of other people
• You're competing to find a needle in a haystack
• It takes a lot of computing power
• It can take a lot of electrical power to generate that computing power
• You can't predict what your payout will be

If you go this route, you'll discover that people have thrown lots of money into the problem, even going as far as to design and build and run custom computer hardware solely for the purpose of generating coins. This has become a sort of computing arms race, where you have to keep investing money to keep up with everyone else.

If you're starting to see an investing opportunity in selling this hardware or related services, you might be onto something.

Invest in Dogecoin without Mining

Savvy investors have already started to realize there's another way to get these cryptocoins. Initial miners want dollars and people with dollars want coins, so exchanges like Coinbase (referral link; gives you $10 in Bitcoin on deposit) eventually opened, where you can buy, sell, and trade cryptocurrencies for other cryptocurrencies or for currencies in general.

That's not the only place to buy and sell though.

Thanks to ETFs like BTC-USD and DOGE-USD you can trade Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and other cryptocurrencies as if they were other securities. In other words, you can buy into the Bitcoin ETF at $35,000 a share and sell at $40,000 a share without mining or finding someone to sell you Bitcoins.

In this case, you can speculate on price moves of the underlying component without having to shell out for expensive hardware on your own.

Dogecoin Sounds Weird

What is Dogecoin? A joke that's gotten out of hand!

Back in the day, a photogenic Shiba Inu named Suki became a meme, with "doge" as the misspelling of "dog". Dogs can't spell, and a Shiba Inu is friendly and helpful, so the meme spread with the dog exclaiming many wonderful phrases of wonderment.

When cryptocurrencies first appeared, most holders were miners. Two programmers named Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus created Dogecoin as a joke to poke fun at the early crypto exuberance.

The joke turned real. (Also a couple of bugs in their fork of Bitcoin turned out to be important features!)

That's why you can buy Dogecoin (often called "Doge", as a single unit is a "doge") on cryptocurrency exchanges such as Coinbase, or trade DOGE on markets such as DOGE-USD.

Is it serious? Entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk and Mark Cuban have voiced some support (though it's often hard to tell whether they're joining in the Internet irony or genuinely backing the project).

Here's the good news: Dogecoin isn't inherently more or less risky than other cryptocurrencies. Its value comes from collective belief, not from underlying business operations. It's not a factory or a revenue-generating company; it's an entry in a distributed ledger. There's no single company or shadowy cabal of developers behind it. It's truly a community project.

In March 2021, Bitcoin sold for $48,000 apiece. Doge sold for $0.05. By June, Bitcoin had slipped to $35,000 and Doge had risen to $0.30. By March 2022, Dogecoin traded around $0.12 per coin and Bitcoin $38,700 per coin. In 2025, Dogecoin has had a high of $0.40 and a low of $0.14.

Experienced investors understand that a security's price reflects belief about future value. Doge and Bitcoin can both double, but Doge is much cheaper to buy: $100 will buy you thousands of Doge and only a small fraction of a Bitcoin.

If you have a good brokerage set up, you can start trading now.

Crypto is More Than Investing / Doge as Currency

Of course, the other value of a cryptocurrency is as a unit of transfer. Think of the difference of buying an ETF that invests in gold bullion versus buying a gold coin. Sure, having a gold coin is cool but you can trade it to someone else who wants it for lots of reasons, not because it represents a gold bar stored in a vault somewhere.

Sure, buying Doge makes a virtual Shiba Inu Dog somewhere happy. But you can also buy things with it, send it to other people, or receive it on your own.

For example, a crypto faucet called Rollercoin (affiliate link; get a bonus for signing up) uses the lure of earning multiple cryptocurrencies to build up a marketplace with its own custom currency. While it's structured as a game with a thin narrative over mining, you can earn tiny fractions of coins by playing little games.

This could change how we think about money. Small online tasks (playing a game, labeling images, or summarizing an article) can produce tiny payments that are inefficient to send by traditional means but can be practical with low-cost digital transfers. Peer-to-peer digital currency has clear advantages for such micro-payments.

Sending $1 here and there via cryptocurrency is a lot easier though. That's one of the things it was made for.

If you create a Dogecoin wallet, you can send and receive payments in whatever size you want.

To send, open your wallet, go to the Send option, and enter an address such as DFhv7MMnDBGeaNmKybvfwF3HaJxN3Dtg3y. Choose what you want to send, and you're off!

Similarly, to receive, generate an address of your own, give it to the sender, and wait for the transaction to work its way through the ledger.

Implications of Doge as Transfer

What happens if Dogecoin becomes a popular mechanism for transferring money online? Alternately, what needs to happen?

Unlike Bitcoin, Dogecoin:

• Has a continuously growing supply. Unlike Bitcoin's capped supply, Dogecoin's supply increases over time; price gains so far reflect demand more than a hard cap on coins.
• Currently has fewer holders and miners than Bitcoin (though that could change).
• Has much lower transaction fees; you can often send Dogecoin for a tiny fraction of a penny versus far higher costs on crowded networks.
• Requires less mining power and energy to secure transactions compared with some other networks.
• Confirms blocks more frequently (roughly every minute versus Bitcoin's ~10 minutes), which helps small payments finalize faster.
• Has less of Bitcoin's speculative hype, which can make it less volatile in practice.

If you'd mined a few million Dogecoin when it first came out, you'd have a nice chunk of value now (and it may grow further), but the era of 10,000%+ returns is unlikely to repeat. The most important question is how Dogecoin might be used in the future: primarily as a transfer mechanism for small or recurring payments.

For example, one of Trendshare's developers built a Dogecoin-powered pinball machine, which uses Dogecoin payments to trigger adding credits to the Lord of the Rings Stern pinball machine.

Should Value Investors Play with Dogecoin

While Bitcoin and other currencies have all the buzz, Doge's semi-joke status makes it more interesting. It's probably not going to make anyone rich at this point.

For testing purposes, throwing in a couple of hundred dollars of fun money can help you figure out the basics. Cryptocurrency may never replace the dollar or other nationally-issued instruments, but the enforced artificial scarcity represented by mining, the fractional transfers, and the globally-public and cryptographically secure ledger are unique features that dollars can't provide on their own.

Don't make Bitcoin or Dogecoin a core holding in your portfolio. If you want to experiment, limit it to a small, affordable amount of fun money so you can learn how the system works. Understand the mechanics and risks. Often the people who profit most are those selling hardware and services around mining and trading.

Frequently asked questions

Is Dogecoin a good investment in 2025?

Dogecoin is highly speculative. Consider a small 'fun money' allocation to learn the space; avoid making it a core holding.

How can I buy Dogecoin safely?

Use a reputable exchange, enable two-factor authentication, consider withdrawing to a secure wallet for long-term storage, and only buy what you can afford to lose.

Do I need to mine Dogecoin to own it?

No. Most users buy Dogecoin on exchanges or through brokerages rather than mining, which is resource-intensive and competitive.

How much Dogecoin should I buy?

There's no one-size-fits-all answer; treat it as a small experiment. Many investors start with an amount they can afford to lose—often a few hundred dollars or less.

Do I owe taxes when I sell Dogecoin?

In many jurisdictions, selling or trading cryptocurrency is a taxable event. Keep records of your purchases and sales and consult a tax professional for your local rules.

What's the safest way to store Dogecoin?

For long-term holdings, consider a hardware wallet or other cold storage. For small, active balances, reputable custodial wallets and exchanges with strong security practices are fine—but withdraw large amounts to cold storage.

Can I get exposure to Dogecoin through ETFs?

Some markets offer crypto ETFs or derivatives that provide exposure to Dogecoin or broader crypto baskets. ETFs remove the need to manage wallets but check fees and structure carefully.

How can I reduce volatility risk with Dogecoin?

Volatility is inherent. Techniques like dollar-cost averaging, limiting position size, or using stablecoin hedges can help, but they don't eliminate risk.

What should I watch to avoid scams?

Be wary of unsolicited investment tips, guarantee-of-returns claims, phishing links, fake wallets, and projects that pressure you to act quickly. Always verify URLs and use official exchange/wallet apps.