FOMO for Dogecon: What You Missed At the Gathering of the 'Shibes'

Admit it: you wish you were there.

Dance parties, rap shows, puppy parades – you name it, Dogecon had it.

And, perhaps more importantly, what this untraditional gathering of the crypto community didn't have was pretty striking considering the circumstances: a panic over falling crypto prices.

Indeed, as Matt Condon put it on Twitter, "radical positivity" was the name of the day at Dogecon.

The four-day celebratory conference about "the social layer of crypto culture" took place in Vancouver, British Columbia. Built around the cryptocurrency with a Shiba Inu at its heart, the conference received overwhelmingly positive reviews both from attendees and those who watched from the virtual sidelines.

Even the sponsors of the event were largely unabashed on social media:

With over 200 participants having attended Dogecon Vancouver, its success – amplified by crypto Twitter – arguably brought a breath of fresh air to a community that, in recent weeks, has been bogged down with concerning news of hacks, bearish market trends and cryptocurrency forks.

As one enthusiast asked (perhaps rhetorically):

The event may perhaps be proof of at least one thing: the near-zealous commitment the project still attracts, with recent charts showing that dogecoin transactions frequently outnumber those of bitcoin cash, the fourth most popular cryptocurrency in the world (by comparison, dogecoin is 40th by market capitalization, according to CoinMarket Cap).

So why the attraction? Dogecoin was always more about its community than challenging its crypto-cousin bitcoin, save for its vastly expanded token supply, faster block-times and viral memes. And the cryptocurrency inarguably suffered a blow in the wake of well-publicized scams like Moolah and the pump-and-dump schemes of Wolong.

Indeed, when the dogecoin first launched, it almost immediately attracted a following friendlier to newcomers in the crypto space than the "overly serious" bitcoin community.

Perhaps that's SmileyGnome's (likely rhetorical) point – that events like Dogecon seek to offer an alternative to the toxicity on display in the crypto-community on an all-too-often basis.

Or, at the very least, it's an opportunity to praise Lord Doge.

Image via CoinDesk archives