With Bitcoin suffering a roughly 50% value drop thanks to a report out of China that the country’s special bank wasn’t allowing money to be deposited into the virtual currency in Chinese Yuan, people are going to start looking to other cryptocurrency alternatives.

While you may have heard of Litecoin, the latest virtual currency du jour is based on a meme. Get ready for Dogecoin.

According to Wikipedia, Dogecoin has only been active for about two weeks. It’s the brain child of Adobe Australian a marketing specialist, Jackson Palmer, and American programmer Billy Marcus. Palmer joked on Twitter that he was going to invest in Dogecoin, then a non-existent currency. After getting some replies, he set up the Dogecoin.com domain.

Palmer was trying to create his own Bitcoin-esque currency that had a broader appeal than Bitcoin. When he heard of Dogecoin, he decided to create it. He contacted Palmer, started reconfiguring the Bitcoin source code and a partnership was formed. About a week after the initial tweet, Dogecoin, the first ever virtual currency based on a meme, was a reality.

Now, Dogecoin might sound like a joke but it’s actually the fastest growing cryptocurrency in the world with the USD value of one Dogecoin (DOGE for short) increasing 366% over the last 24 hours as of writing. It also is the 8th largest virtual currency in the world based on market capitalization at a total value of almost $12 million. Yes, that’s all in two weeks.

As of writing, only about 10% of all Dogecoins have been mined. I can’t see this becoming Bitcoin or even Litecoin but I think it’s pretty damn cool that a meme is getting its own currency. With all the democratization of everything on the internet, the rise of Dogecoin is a sign that even currency is democratized. Wow! Such money!

Sources: Business Insider, Digital Trends, Crypto-Currency Market Capitalization, DogeChain