Dogethereum Announces Alpha Release

On Friday, August 17, the team behind the Dogecoin-Ethereum bridge announced the alpha release of Dogethereum. After 13 months in development, the bridge will be used to move coins from the Dogecoin blockchain to Ethereum and vice versa.

This bridge is informed by the concept of Superblocks, which white paper authors Ismael Bejarano and Oscar Guindzberg describe as one enormous block containing the root hash of a Merkle tree built from the block hashes of several blocks, as well as some other information. According to Bejarano and Guindzberg, by representing a range of blocks instead of storing all block headers, the costs associated with block storage would be minimized.

Individuals can test the bridge by following the team’s user guide on GitHub, though Guindzberg notes that some features are yet to be implemented and there may be bugs. He also warns people to only use the bridge “with coins you are open to loose [sic].” The Dogethereum crew will livestream a demonstration of the bridge on September 5 at 10 a.m. PDT.

However, Dogethereum is a bit of a mystery. It was announced earlier this year that Dogethereum would fork Dogecoin and offer its own token, DOGX. The hard fork does not appear related to the Dogecoin-Ethereum bridge that Guindzberg and Bejarano are developing.

A few months back, one reddit user called attention to the overlap in Dogethereum projects:

“There is an ERC20 token going by the name ‘DOGX’ and calling itself Dogethereum. That project has no association with dogecoin or this dogethereum project. Especially important is that there is no fork of the dogecoin block chain. Someone made a new ETH token and called it Dogethereum.”

A commenter on the same thread elaborated further by saying DOGX was not an ERC20 token and that this Dogethereum project was merely “a new chain with find&replace of Ethereum to Dogethereum.”

On another reddit thread, an individual passionately relayed their thoughts about the Dogethereum confusion:

“No. No. No. Dogethereum IS NOT THIS. Dogethereum is NOT the ERC20 bridge, it is NOT the doge-eth bridge. Dogethereum is NOTHING but a snapshot fork, confusingly named to sound like it’s related to the doge-eth tokenization bridge.”

To complicate matters further, there is the Dogethereum Bridge Art Project, “a penetrable public art space” sponsored by TrueBit, which is developing its own Dogecoin-Ethereum bridge. As the description suggests, the project is a physical representation of Dogethereum. Artist Jessica Angel said she was inspired by the Mobius Bridge in Bristol, England.

However, it appears that the TrueBit bridge and the recent alpha release of Dogethereum refer to the same project. Sina Habibian, a former Dogecoin-Ethereum bridge developer, notes in a Medium article that Guindzberg and Coinfabrik (the company Bejarano works for) have collaborated with TrueBit on the bridge, so it is likely that the TrueBit team is involved with the Dogethereum alpha announced this past Friday.

For the record, it has been rumored that the actual ERC20 Doge token will be called EthDoge, also known as WOW.

Who would’ve thunk that Dogethereum was such a popular neologism?

Daniel Putney is a full-time writer for ETHNews. He received his bachelor’s degree in English writing from the University of Nevada, Reno, where he also studied journalism and queer theory. In his free time, he writes poetry, plays the piano, and fangirls over fictional characters. He lives with his partner, three dogs, and two cats in the middle of nowhere, Nevada.

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