With the alternative digital currency trading at $0.018773 this weekend, its market capitalisation (total value of a company's outstanding shares) stands at $2.12 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.

The parody ‘alt’ coin was named after an internet meme featuring a Shiba Inu dog and had largely been forgotten about since its heyday in 2014. In 2015 Motherboard, the Vice owned technology platform, described it as a “cryptocurrency originally started for s***s and giggles”.

Altcoins are peer-to-peer digital tokens that descended from bitcoin and notable altcoins include steem, ethereum, starts, ark and litecoin with ethereum’s price rising rapidly and hitting $1,157 at the time of press.

However over the last month the price of dogecoin skyrocketed, rising by more than 400 percent, hitting an all-time high above $0.01.

Dogecoin’s founder Jackson Palmer told Coindesk that he had faith in the development team behind dogecoin’s technology, but that it “says a lot about the state of the cryptocurrency space in general that a currency with a dog on it which hasn't released a software update in over two years has a $1bn-plus market cap”.

In 2015, Ben Doernberg, a research assistant at Harvard University was a long-time board member on the Dogecoin Foundation—the volunteer group that organises charitable efforts by the Dogecoin community described the atmosphere at dogecoin HQ as more relaxed than the typical crypto workplace.

Mr Doernberg said: "The people who got into it were goofballs, whereas the previous cryptocurrencies had attracted people who just wanted to get rich.”

The Dogecoin community rallied around lots of charitable causes and raised the money needed to send the Jamaican bobsled team to the winter Olympics.

According to Motherboard they donated $25,000 (£18,455) to a UK service dog charity and collected $30,000 (£22,146) to help people in Kenya get access to clean drinking water.

Mr Doernberg adds: "Those were some of the coolest things we did."

Michael Foote, the owner of comparison site, Quote Goat told Express.co.uk that the growth of dogecoin is a result of people hearing about bitcoin millionaires and now hoping to replicate that success by putting some money into a cheaper coin.

He adds: 'My guess is that a lot of people with money in dogecoin have no idea about the parody element of the coin, however they have seen the comparatively low price and have decided it is worth a punt.

"Maybe the bigger picture of what we are seeing here is that wages are stagnant as are house prices, the cost of living is increasing and people are just desperate for a chance to hopefully win some money with crypto-currencies."