For most of its time on the market, Dogecoin (DOGE 5.93%) has relied on a combination of hype and cultural cachet more than concrete mechanisms to pull in fresh capital. Today, there are three potential catalysts that might shake up that long-running dynamic, perhaps even leaving the coin with a real investment thesis for buying it if everything plays out.
Could these catalysts even send the coin back to the moon? Let's check out what's coming up and see what the impacts could be.
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1. There's a new on-ramp for demand
Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that hold Dogecoin are in the process of hitting the market. The first U.S. ETF tied to Dogecoin, offered by REX-Osprey, launched on Sept. 18. Others are waiting in the wings for their shot at approval by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which could occur next month.
Assuming that these ETFs list and trade well, they might broaden the buyer base for the coin and thereby incrementally tighten its float, or the coins available for public trading.
The obvious caveats about meme coin investing still apply here, of course. ETFs do not erase volatility or risk, they just package it so that it's easy to get exposure in a traditional financial brokerage rather than a crypto wallet or exchange. And as of now, Dogecoin doesn't have any reliable way of gaining value.
Therefore, while an ETF approval is a meaningful access upgrade, it is not a magic price-increasing machine. But some upward price pressure is likely in both the short term and the long term, and it probably will improve sentiment about the coin in general.
2. Treasury companies are buying it
Until recently, Dogecoin was favored pretty much exclusively by retail investors. Now, a much richer class of investor is arriving on the scene to buy up some of the supply.
Crypto treasury companies that explicitly raise capital to accumulate Dogecoin and hold it as a treasury reserve are starting to emerge, as are other companies that are simply opting to buy and hold it as part of their asset base. One example of such a business, CleanCore Solutions, announced in early September that it raised $175 million in a private placement to establish a Dogecoin treasury. That's a huge amount of purchasing pressure, even considering the coin's market cap of $40 billion.
This is a big deal because buyers with large balance sheets tend to be slow sellers, which can reduce the available float and add marginal price support over time while potentially reducing volatility too. To keep perspective here, know that Dogecoin's circulating supply is on the order of 151 billion coins, so even hundreds of millions owned by a single company would still be a tiny slice. Thus investors should probably keep their expectations for price appreciation in check, especially considering that it's unclear exactly how many Dogecoin treasury companies there will ultimately be, not to mention how much capital they might bring to the table.
Still, a cohort of intentional Dogecoin accumulators is a real break from the past, and it's an undeniably bullish factor.
3. A push toward building utility is on the table
Dogecoin is a crypto asset without any utility. But there's a community of developers associated with it, and that very group is now debating whether to make some major improvements and substantive additions to the coin's capabilities.
The DogeOS team, a group associated with the MyDoge wallet ecosystem, has submitted a Dogecoin improvement proposal to add a new feature. That new feature would let the network verify certain valuable cryptographic proofs natively.
The greater aim of this new feature is to enable the creation of Layer-2 applications that reside on the main Dogecoin chain, effectively delivering smart contract-like capabilities. In plain English, that means Dogecoin would get an expansion that would make it able to host value-generating applications via smart contracts.
If this plan is implemented, Dogecoin could host games, identity tools, or even basic decentralized finance apps that pay fees in DOGE. It might also allow for the creation of bridges that bring external liquidity (and capital) back to the main chain. And that would mean the coin could eventually, for the first time, have the makings of a real investment thesis for buying it that's not dependent on hype, frothy market conditions, or other unreliable factors.
In practice, there is a long road between developer discussions and secure production code. So investors should treat this as a possibility rather than a guarantee, and be aware that it's not something that justifies purchasing the coin today.
