Image: NukaColaV13/Reddit
Quickly, Dogecoin has become the go-to altcoin for kickstarting highdeas, or, ideas that people come up with when high. One such highdea, an attempt posted on reddit to put a dogecoin-sponsored and themed car on NASCAR’s track has met its funding goal today. It only took eight days.
The goal of 67.5 million dogecoin was raised just hours after news spread that the founder of crypto payments system Moolah.io, Alex Green, had accidentally donated 20 million Dogecoins (worth about $13,000). Green later released a chatlog, which shows he’d mistakenly added one too many zeros to his donation.
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Following a series of causes it’s bolstered—like providing clean drinking water for Kenyans, and sending the Jamaican bobsled team to Sochi—Dogecoin is giving Bitcoin a run for its digital money when it comes to sense of community, while also catching the eye of audiences the original cryptocurrency has not.
Capturing the attention of the unlikely NASCAR crowd, the Dogecoin-painted car will be driven by Josh Wise (#98) at Talladega on May 4th. Wise is one of many NASCAR drivers that races without fulltime sponsorship, which redditor unicorn_butt_sex cited in the initial post announcing the fundraiser:
I realized that the driver of the number 98 Chevrolet SS, Josh Wise was sponsorless. He was racing the wheels off the car. He was fighting his underfunded teams car like he stole it. Sadly the car was just black with no sponsors.
Over the weekend, I ran into Leilani Munter, one of NASCAR’s four female drivers. When I explained the cryptocurrency to her, the doge meme, and that Wise’s car would potentially be painted with its face, she expressed a reasonable amount of jealousy. “Put it on my car,” she begged.
Since the funding to put a Shiba Inu’s face on Wise’s Chevy was crowdsourced, the official artwork will be up to the crowd as well. “In order to get the best paintjob possible, it was proposed that we should do a paintjob contest,” reads another the post on reddit, where templates and layout specs have been made downloadable to aspiring dogecar artists.
The eventual production of a Hot Wheels-esque, die-cast model of Wise’s doge-faced car, seems inevitable, as it’s a constant concern. The original poster explains, “Every single paint scheme that NASCAR runs there is a diecast maker named Lionel and will make many toy cars that look exactly like the race car. There is the large version which is high quality that is $64.99 is the small car that is $7.49 Imagine that!”
Tomorrow night, at 9PM EST, Wise will be holding an AMA on /r/Dogecoin, to field the questions of gleeful shibes (dogecoiners refer to themselves as shibes). It’ll be interesting to see what Wise has to say about the sponsorship, and his thoughts about the upcoming race general—sure. One thing’s for sure, it’ll all be happening in Comic Sans.
