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How $DOG was born

Written by the volunteers who run DogSwap. Last updated 2026-09-08. Dates from the project's public record, figures from the chain.

$DOG went from a proposal to 100,000,000,000 coins in more than 75,000 wallets in 62 days, and none of it was sold. This is the sequence, with the dates, because the fairness of a launch is a thing you should be able to check rather than a thing you are told.

Runestones handed out, one per wallet
112,383
$DOG created, all of it at once
100,000,000,000
$DOG per Runestone
889,814
Sold to anyone, ever
0

Act one: the rule came before the coin

The unusual thing about this launch is the order it happened in. The fairness rules were argued in public in February 2024, weeks before there was a token, a price or a buyer. Runes did not exist yet. The protocol went live at the halving.

  1. An airdrop is proposed, with conditions attached

    Leonidas, an ordinals collector and commentator, proposed an open source effort to airdrop an inscription to roughly 100,000 members of the Ordinals community. The proposal carried its own constraints from the first day: no team allocation, no misleading marketing, volunteer contributors only.

  2. One per address, so size buys nothing

    The target was clarified the next day: a maximum of one per address. Somebody holding a thousand inscriptions would receive exactly what the hundred thousandth most active member received. This is the decision the rest of the story rests on, and it was made before anybody knew what the thing would be worth.

  3. The Runestone gets a name, and a snapshot in the past

    The project took the name Runestone. Eligibility was set at block 826,600, which had already been mined: exactly one year after Ordinals went live. A snapshot in the past cannot be farmed. Nobody could go and qualify after reading about it.

  4. The eligibility rule, published for anyone to check

    Addresses holding at least 3 inscriptions at that block qualified. Inscriptions whose file type was plain text or JSON were excluded, because those are overwhelmingly BRC-20 mint receipts rather than the collecting the airdrop meant to reward. Bitcoin engineers outside the project were asked to compile the list.

Act two: the Runestone

  1. 3.97 MB, and the largest blocks Bitcoin had ever produced

    The Runestone was inscribed: 3.97 MB of art by the sculptor Leo Caillard, who donated the image under a Creative Commons licence. Writing it took the two largest transactions in the two largest blocks in Bitcoin's history to that point. The inscription is number 63,140,674 and it is on the chain, not on a server.

  2. The list is published before anything is sent

    The final list of 112,383 eligible addresses was agreed by independent engineers and published for anyone to check, on an exchange's own tooling rather than the project's. Publishing the list first is what makes an airdrop auditable: anyone can check whether what was announced is what happened.

  3. One Runestone is auctioned to pay everyone else's fees

    A single Runestone sold at auction for 8 BTC, and 100 percent of the proceeds went to the Bitcoin network fees for the free airdrop. Sending 112,383 inscriptions costs real money. It was paid for by selling one of them, in the open, rather than by holding back a share of the supply.

  4. 112,383 Runestones, to 112,383 addresses

    The airdrop went out. One per wallet, exactly as the rule set three weeks earlier. At this point there is still no $DOG and still no Runes protocol.

Act three: the coin

  1. Everyone meet Dog

    $DOG was announced as the first Runestone memecoin, two weeks before it could exist. The audience was already fixed: whoever held a Runestone. There was nothing to buy and no list to join.

  2. The halving block, and Rune number 3

    Block 840,000 halved the Bitcoin subsidy and activated Casey Rodarmor's Runes protocol in the same instant. DOG·GO·TO·THE·MOON was etched in that block as Rune ID 840000:3, the third rune ever. Competing for space in the halving block is expensive, and the community donated more than 3 BTC in miner fees to land it there.

    The etching created the entire supply at once: 100,000,000,000 $DOG, 100 percent premined, with no mint ever opened. That part is not a claim. It is readable from any ordinals indexer, and it is the reason nobody can print more.

  3. The whole supply leaves, four days later

    All 100,000,000,000 $DOG went out free to the Runestone holders, 889,814 for each of the 112,383 Runestones. By then those Runestones sat in more than 75,000 wallets, because people had traded and consolidated in the five weeks since March. Nothing was kept back.

Two numbers that are easy to confuse

112,383 is how many Runestones exist, one per eligible wallet in March. More than 75,000 is how many wallets held one when $DOG was distributed in April. The gap is ordinary trading between the two dates. A sentence that says a hundred thousand wallets received $DOG is using the first number for the second question.

The per-Runestone figure is 889,814, and you can check it: 100,000,000,000 divided by 112,383 is 889,814.29. The number 889,806 appears in several write-ups and does not divide correctly, so it has been copied rather than calculated.

Why we put this on a swap site

Because the distribution is the reason $DOG has the holder base it has, and a holder base is the thing an order book is made of. It is also the honest answer to a fair question. A site that lets you swap a coin has an interest in that coin, so the useful thing we can offer is not enthusiasm but the dates, the numbers, and where each one came from.

None of this is a statement about what $DOG is worth or will be worth. What the record supports is narrow and factual: the supply is fixed, it was given away rather than sold, and the rules were published before the value existed.

Where each claim comes from