Dogecoin’s creator sold all his coins 6 years ago after getting laid off — and says he is stunned by the mania around the meme-based token

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Billy Markus, Dogecoin’s creator, said on Reddit that he sold all his coins in 2015 after getting laid off.
Markus spent it all on buying a used Honda Civic. The current frenzy around the token is a mystery to him.
He said he’s no longer part of the Dogecoin project and doesn’t own any of it.
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Dogecoin’s creator, Billy Markus, took to Reddit this week to explain he is no longer part of the project and is unable to help those asking him for tips on how to get rich.
In the Dogecoin subreddit, Markus said he sold all his coins six years ago, after getting laid off and ended up buying a used Honda Civic.
“I’m no longer part of the Dogecoin project, I left around 2015, as the community started to strongly shift from one that I was comfortable with,” he wrote. “I don’t currently own any Dogecoin, except what has been tipped to me recently, I gave away and/or sold all the crypto I had back in 2015, after being laid off and scared about my dwindling savings at the time, for about enough in total to buy a used Honda Civic.”
Dogecoin has been gaining immense traction in the financial world after a Reddit-fueled rally pushed the cryptocurrency by about 1,500% higher so far this year. Billionaire Elon Musk has also lent multiple endorsements for the dog-themed token on Twitter, most recently saying that he bought some for his son. At the same time, general investors have been contemplating its utility in the world and raising legitimate questions: is it really a currency or an investing tool?
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Dogecoin has hit a whopping $10 billion valuation, meaning that it’s now more valuable than companies like Shake Shack, Under Armour, or Blackberry. And unlike Bitcoin’s 21 million supply ceiling, it has no hard limit of its own.
The 38-year-old founder now works as a software engineer for an education firm in San Francisco. Given that he along with co-founder Jackson Palmer created the token as a joke, he told Bloomberg he finds the mania around Dogecoin bizarre.
“I see this random crap on the internet saying I have all this money. That’s cool, but where is it?” Markus said. “I’m a normal working person. I’m not in trouble or anything, but I’m not rich.”
His exclusion from the current craze around Dogecoin grants him a spot to witness the interest from afar. But he can’t really explain it either, saying that it’s weird how something he made in a few hours is now part of internet culture.
 “It’s amusing to see Elon Musk talk about it. It feels silly, but there’s this huge upwelling behind it,” he told Bloomberg.
It’s hard for him to comprehend the Reddit frenzy and flurry of supportive tweets from Musk. “Maybe it’s that Dogecoin can be a good barometer for how far from reality things can get,” Markus said.
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