Dogecoin, the world’s largest meme cryptocurrency by market capitalization is about to get a major structural facelift that could give its price the much-needed boost to $1.
According to a Monday Blog by BluePepper Labs, Dogecoin’s maiden bridge to Ethereum, “wDoge bridge” is at an advanced development stage and is expected to go live before 2022 ends. The bridge, which is inspired by the safest blockchain bridge WBTC, will enable users to move DOGE from the Dogecoin blockchain to the Ethereum blockchain and back.
It will also introduce Dogecoin to smart contracts allowing “Dogecoins on the Ethereum blockchain to be used in Turing-complete smart contracts, DeFi protocols, NFT marketplaces, wallets with fancy features,” the blog stated.
Currently, users are unable to execute smart contracts or implement various decentralized protocols on top of Dogecoin due to its limited scripting language. Since the bridge’s development began in 2017, Engineers have grappled with Dogecoin’s codebase, tweaking its transactional compatibility with Ethereum and evaluating the project’s opportunity cost.
Security was also been a top concern for the new bridge, with blockchain bridges such as Axie Infinity’s Ronin bridge falling prey to attacks that left over $620 million lost in March. Recent data from Chainalysis has disclosed that roughly $1 bilion in crypto assets has been stolen from blockchain bridges in 2022, making them the riskiest protocols in the DeFi industry.
Bluepepper also stated that it planned on building an ecosystem on top of the bridge, calling on various stakeholders, including Whales and Exchanges, to provide liquidity. Once complete, the bridge will consist of a governing authority (DAO), a custodian to safeguard all DOGE used to mint wDoge and a merchant to facilitate all minting and burning of wDoge.
Despite Dogecoin’s explosive growth, the Dogecoin community has been waiting for the bridge to go live for a long time. Elon Musk has been one of the biggest supporters of the crypto asset, stating on various occasions that he was working with Dogecoin developers to improve the blockchain’s code.
In the past year, major brands have started accepting payments in Dogecoin, including AMC, Tesla, Newegg, airBaltic and Mark Cuban-helmed Dallas Mavericks. Once the said bridge goes live, Dogecoin payments and general activities on the blockchain are poised to surge exponentially tagging along with the price.
Since tapping an all-time high in May 2021, Dogecoin has suffered an unsettling pullback, losing about 90% of its value to trade at $0.07 as of writing. The cryptocurrency has, however, managed to retain the tenth position by market capitalization, signalling just how much conviction investors have in the blockchain.