A technology upgrade could pave the way for it to have a real investment thesis for the first time.
Sometimes old dog meme coins can learn new tricks, and for Dogecoin, (DOGE 2.38%) that process may finally be underway. After years of little in the way of protocol changes, the coin’s developers are now circulating a few proposals that could expand Dogecoin’s capabilities in ways that actually matter.
Two ideas are on the table right now. If either gets developed and sees use, Dogecoin’s appeal might widen beyond memes and momentum. Here’s what’s being considered and how it could change things.
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This would be quite the new trick
Presently, Dogecoin does not natively support smart contracts, which is why decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and complex decentralized apps (dApps) never had a chance to grow on its base layer.
What’s new is a concrete proposal to add a feature to the coin’s protocol that would let Dogecoin nodes verify a type of cryptographic proof called zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs as part of a transaction. That would enable Dogecoin to host Layer-2 (L2) chains for faster and more efficient transactions, and also provide virtual machines that execute off-chain. This means it would create a separate but closely linked system for quickly running certain complex calculations.
But why should investors care?
Because this route could bring Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible smart contract execution to Dogecoin, thereby enabling Ethereum’s huge corps of developers to easily create applications for the chain if they choose to do so. In other words, this is the shortest bridge between Dogecoin’s powerful brand and the programmable crypto economy, the area where most of the value lies.
This proposal lives in Dogecoin Core’s developer forum. If it’s agreed on, it would still need to be implemented, and it’s unclear how much time a major addition like this one would take. Plus, there is still community debate about the complexity of the proposal and also its scope.
So don’t hold your breath waiting for this new feature because it might not ever come to fruition, even if it would be enormous for the coin’s odds of gaining value over time.
There’s a potential revenue flywheel here
The second idea that investors need to know is more subtle, but potentially even more powerful for holders.
If Dogecoin can verify cryptographic proofs on-chain as the proposal calls for, submitting those transactions will require network fees, which are paid in Dogecoin’s native coin, DOGE. So each proof-verified action on the L2 chain would create more marginal demand for the coin than transactions on the main chain currently do.
Today, fee revenue on Dogecoin is modest, a byproduct of transfers; so far in Q3 2025, it generated just $281,557 in fees. Fees are paid to miners, and no portion of the fees are burned, taking coins out of circulation. If proof verification becomes a new transaction class, a flywheel could potentially form, with more useful apps, more proofs, more fees, more miner incentives, and more reasons for users and platforms to hold some DOGE to interact with the network. And there’s some early evidence that the team behind the proposal is building with those goals in mind.
As positive as these proposals could be, investors should keep three caveats front and center. First, as stated before, proposals are not products, and Dogecoin’s culture is conservative about base-layer changes. Don’t expect anything to move forward without the developer community spending at least a bit more time deliberating publicly.
Second, the coin’s supply is expansionary by design. Roughly 5 billion new coins are issued each year, so any utility that it develops needs to create economics that grow faster than that to meaningfully move the value needle over time.
Finally, there still isn’t an investment thesis for buying this coin yet. While that could change in the future, given what’s being considered, you should wait for some strong evidence of actual progress before even considering whether it would be smart to make a small investment.