On Thursday, following Robinhood’s listing of shiba inu, the co-founder and CEO of Robinhood, Vladimir Tenev, spoke about dogecoin being the future currency of the internet on Twitter. Tenev’s Twitter thread got a lot of comments and also received responses from the co-founder of the meme-based crypto, Billy Markus, and Tesla’s Elon Musk.
Robinhood CEO explains how Dogecoin “can be the future currency of the internet and people”
Dogecoin (DOGE), Elon Musk’s favorite crypto asset, caught the eye on Thursday after Bulgarian-American entrepreneur and Robinhood CEO Vladimir Tenev started a thread on the subject of the meme- token. The topic began as Twitter was on fire with comments regarding Elon Musk’s unsolicited offer to buy the social media platform. It also follows Robinhood’s recent shiba inu (SHIB) listing and the company’s addition of DOGE.
“Can Doge truly be the future currency of the Internet and the people?” Tenev tweeted on Thursday. “As we added the ability to send/receive DOGE on Robinhood, I’ve been thinking about what that would take. First off, transaction fees have to be vanishingly small. We’re already there. As of last Nov’s 1.14.5 update, typical transaction fees have been ~$0.003 – which you can experience on [Robinhood App] – compared to the 1-3% network fees that major card networks charge,” Tenev added.
The CEO of Robinhood further stated that the blocking time should be fast enough to register on-chain in less time than a point-of-sale (POS) transaction. “But it shouldn’t be so fast that miners start building too many competing chains and wasting excessive amounts of energy building consensus,” Tenev said. The Robinhood exec continued:
Doge’s current block time is 1 minute. This is a bit on the long side for payments – a ten second block time would be more appropriate as it would be less than the typical time spent completing a debit card transaction.
Elon Musk: “Block size and time should keep pace with the rest of the internet”
Following Tenev’s statements on Twitter, Musk responded after a very active day on Twitter for the Tesla executive. “6 seconds, better said 6000 milliseconds, which is a long time for computers, that’s about right”, Musk responded to the CEO of Robinhood. To make the conversation a bit more interesting, Dogecoin co-founder and software engineer Billy Markus added his two cents to the discussion with Tenev and Musk.
Markus detailed that eight years ago, he chose one minute blocks because “someone on bitcointalk said 45 seconds on a different chain was causing lots of issues, and 60 seconds was the fastest without having too many issues.” Markus then said:
The faster while being secure, the better IMO – I guess the infrastructure of the web has improved enough in 8 years to experience its speedup.
Tenev’s Twitter statements follow the recent listing of shiba inu on Robinhood and the CEO has been tweeting about that meme-based crypto asset as well. Musk has been conversing about Dogecoin network improvements for quite some time now (usually on Twitter), and has briefly mentioned a few times last year that the network should scale to the masses. In Tenev’s thread, Musk added a response to Markus’ “faster while still secure, the better” opinion and said: “Exactly, block size & time should keep pace with the rest of the Internet.”
Tenev’s statements on Twitter also addressed Dogecoin’s supply mechanics when he explained that DOGE is “inflationary and the supply is infinite, as opposed to Bitcoin’s finite supply of 21 million coins.” Robinhood’s CEO said:
~5B new Doge are created every year, and the current supply is about 132B. This results in a current inflation rate of
Since Musk started talking about scaling the Dogecoin network last year, the Dogecoin Core development Github repository has seen a lot more action over the past 12 months. In fact, statistics from 1000x.group show that between August 2017 and January 2021, the development of the Dogecoin network stagnated. Active developers on the Dogecoin Core network lately include programmers Patrick Lodder and Ross Nicoll.
