Being a meme coin is secondary. Of course immensely valuable in terms of being an actual social coin of the internet age. And increasingly FUD-resistant, thankfully.
But more importantly, DOGE has in fact an actual use case that is alive and well working, albeit under most new people's radar. Fast transactions and low fees has effectively turned dogecoin into the coin of preference for liquidity and hedging. Which means that in times when BTC loses against USD, Dogecoin tends to increase its BTC-satoshi value, hence keeping dogecoin on par with USD. It has been a considerable time now since dogecoin turned its back on being strictly valued against BTC.
An example: last night BTC made a temporary USD-nosedive, effectively making the troll box of poloniex go wild about the imminent crash of altcoins, doge included of course. But what actually happened was that BTC started to gather around the safe haven, that's dogecoin, in order to heighten the probability of protecting the investors' worth of USD. Naturally there are exceptions to the norm. Trolls sometimes succeed in making investors fall for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (That's what FUD means, for any newcomers to know), triggering a temporary sell-off.
The hedging tradition most notably seen on poloniex has it's benefits and drawbacks, depending on how you look at it.
If you are looking for dramatic booms and busts, pump and dumps; sure, dogecoin has had it's share, but oftentimes the hedging at poloniex nowadays tends to ease-up and smoothen the wildest swings... Even making dogecoin look like a boring investment to new-comers. But as history (recent and brittle, I know) has indicated, when the asian dogecoin markets can't wait to spike, there is usually a slowly moving build-up during countless hours where dogecoin patiently waits for investors to make up their minds to buy or sell before the train leaves for the next level.
So whatever you do. Trust only yourself. Read up and make your own educated guess. Only invest what you can afford. And do come over and visit us at
https://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/. We're in it for the fun, sometimes failing forward on third party stuff not under dogecoin control. But at the end of the day the technology works perfectly to provide the cryptocurrency eco-system with a cheap and fast transactional backbone.
/Me
P.s Devs never left. Community never left. Just took a break while waiting for the market to mature. And now we're growing at a flippening speed. D.S