The development of Dogecoin is open, permissionless, and participatory. Over the years, different development teams have contributed to the development of Dogecoin Core, the reference implementation of Dogecoin.
Dogecoin was created in 2013 by Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer. Billy participated in its first release as the lead developer of Dogecoin Core. Dogecoin Core was originally derived from Lucky Coin and Litecoin, which were derived from Bitcoin Core. Therefore, most of the code of Dogecoin Core is derived from the work done by Bitcoin developers on their project.
In 2014, Billy and Jackson left the project. Another group of developers replaced them as maintainers of the project. This team has been changing over the years, and it is a productive collaboration of more than 40 contributors. If new contributors want to get involved in the development of Dogecoin Core, please visit its public code repository on Github.
The development of the entire ecosystem is also critical—just as the purpose of the reference implementation is to establish a solid and stable foundation, innovation can occur through services built on top of it (and sometimes, in conjunction with it). There are many independent developers, organizations, and companies building services on top of the existing Dogecoin Core codebase, including payment channel functionality, experimental support for NFTs, and tipping services.
