Dogecoin could become internet’s currency, Robinhood CEO says

The top boss at Robinhood is bullish about dogecoin’s outlook — proposing the meme token has the potential to become the “future currency of the internet” if the developers take a key step to improve its functionality.

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev detailed the hypothetical in a lengthy Twitter thread after his retail investing platform added a feature allowing users to buy and sell dogecoin.

Tenev noted dogecoin already has “vanishingly small” transaction fees when compared to traditional credit card network charges – an advantage “compared to the 1-3% network fees that major card networks charge.”

But in order to compete with the likes of Visa and other mainstream payment processors, Tenev said dogecoin developers would need to boost the crypto token’s “block time,” or the process by which it verifies transactions.

Tenev said dogecoin’s current block time is “a bit on the long side for payments,” with a platform capable of performing roughly 40 transactions per second (tps).

“As a comparison, Visa’s network can theoretically handle 65,000 tps,” Tenev said. “Doge would need to be able to significantly outperform Visa, which entails increasing throughput by at least 10000x. Fortunately, this is easy to solve simply by increasing the block size limit.”

The Robinhood chief also pushed back on concerns that dogecoin would stoke inflation because it has an ever-expanding supply of tokens – claiming the currency’s inflation rate is actually lower than the US dollar as of now.

Dogecoin has gained popularity alongside other leading cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ether in recent years.

A single dogecoin was worth about $0.15 as of Friday afternoon – with prices hovering near that point for much of 2022, according to Coinbase.

The meme token’s market capitalization is approximately $19.5 billion, much lower than bitcoin’s, which is approaching $769 billion.

One of the most prominent proponents of dogecoin is Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has invested in meme token and allows customers to pay for merchandise on the electric car maker’s website using dogecoin.

Musk, who made a bid this week to purchase Twitter for $43 billion, has also suggested that the social media company should integrate dogecoin into its platform.