Can Dogecoin Become The Currency Of The Internet? Robinhood CEO Thinks It’s Possible

Vladimir Tenev, CEO and co-founder of Robinhood, took to social media to outline how Dogecoin (DOGE) could become the “currency of the internet.”

Vladimir Tenev Puts His Hope on Dogecoin

In a 12-post thread to his more than 200K Twitter followers, Tenev outlined what DOGE needed to do to become a global medium of exchange, usable for everyday online transactions.

The Robinhood CEO began by pointing out that DOGE’s transaction fee, pegged at $0.003, was among the lowest in the industry, especially compared to legacy payment systems, which routinely charge anything between 1 and 3% in network fees.

Tenev feels that Dogecoin being significantly cheaper to transact with makes the meme coin a feasible frontrunner in the e-cash space.

The Bulgarian-born tech entrepreneur also claimed that criticism of DOGE’s inflationary nature was overblown. In the Twitter thread, Tenev suggested that creating 5 billion DOGE tokens every year keeps Dogecoin’s current inflation rate at less than 5%, which is lower than the U.S. dollar.

Tenev believes that the fixed annual issuance of DOGE tokens will gradually decline its inflation rate. He claimed that the rate might go below 2% in the next twenty years.

Dogecoin’s Block Time And Block Size Need Improving

However, Tenev also pointed out that DOGE needs to improve its block time and block size. Currently, DOGE has a one-minute block time and a 1MB block size, which means that it can only handle about 40 transactions per second.

The VISA network, one of the most widely used payments platforms, can handle up to 65K transactions per second.

To stake its claim as a legitimate payment avenue, Dogecoin will have to outperform the likes of VISA significantly. And Tenev feels this can be achieved by increasing Dogecoin’s throughput by up to 1000 times. According to Tenev, this increase in throughput can be achieved by moving Dogecoin’s block size limit to 1GB. 

Increasing DOGE’s block size to such a level would raise the meme coin’s block time to 10 seconds, making DOGE transactions much faster than typical debit card transactions.

Increasing DOGE’s Block Time and Block Size May Make It More Vulnerable

While Tenev’s suggestion seems straightforward, block time and block size can hugely impact a network’s security, scalability, and decentralization.

Speeding up Dogecoin’s block time by 1000X means having a block every 0.06 seconds instead of 60 seconds. This would increase DOGE’s blockchain size by 1000 times, spelling doom for its decentralization.

Anyone can run a DOGE node on their laptop, but the considerable amount of data generated from increasing the meme coin’s block time and block size would require big data centers to manage it. Therefore, Dogecoin’s network will become more centralized as there will be very few nodes capable of handling potentially multi-terabyte-sized nodes.

A higher degree of centralization would make it easier for bad-faith actors to attack Dogecoin’s nodes because it is easier to hack ten nodes than to attack 1000 at the same time.

Meme Coins Market Activity

Meanwhile, DOGE continues to maintain its status as the biggest meme coin by market cap. At the time of writing, the token was priced at $0.1487, a 3.87% increase in the last 24 hours.

Shiba Inu (SHIB), the second most popular meme currency, was also doing well in the market. Its current price of $0.0000261 marked a 4.61% growth from previous prices in the last seven days.

However, other meme coins have not been performing as well. For instance, Dogelon Mars (ELON) was trading at $0.0000007985, a 1.36% drop in the last 24 hours and a massive 15.72% decrease in the last seven days.