Today is Dogeparty's 10th birthday! The birth date occurred on this day @ 14:25:36 GMT, which is slightly less than 4 hours from now. Here's where it started, transaction #0:
, the summary of which can be found here, in case Twitter somehow goes down but this forum remains:
Dogeparty at 10 Years - Part 1: The BeginningModeled after Counterparty, Bitcoin's premiere tokenization protocol, Dogeparty celebrates its 10th birthday today! 🥳
Join us as we traverse the history of the 1st token platform on the world's biggest memecoin - $DOGE.
Dogeparty's origins have a simple backstory.
A tiny startup named Humint, an "innovation lab focused on new uses of cryptographic tokens," wanted to build a cheaper, faster tokenization system than Counterparty, which existed on BTC since Jan 2014.
They saw Dogecoin as the logical blockchain choice for hosting what was essentially a cloned version of Counterparty. With 1-minute blocktimes and fees near zero, using Dogecoin meant that creating & moving tokens could be 10x faster and 100x cheaper than using Bitcoin.
Initially, several early Dogecoin developers & community members saw Dogeparty's potential to expand the functionality of $DOGE. Also on board was @AdamBLevine, early Counterparty adopter & host of the influential Let's Talk Bitcoin podcast.
Adam had already demonstrated to his podcast audience the power of tokenization via creating his own Counterparty tokens, which had actual use case & functionality (TATIANACOIN, LTBCOIN, EARLY).
One of the 1st items of business would be to decide if the process of obtaining the platform's utility token, $XDP, would be through the same mechanism used by Counterparty's $XCP: Proof of Burn.
In some ways, Proof of Burn was an extremely fair way to obtain a new token: everyone must "burn" some BTC by sending it to a designated, unspendable address to get XCP. Nobody got it for free, not even the developers.
In other ways, PoB could be seen as wasteful -- de-circulating coins generated by a PoW system forever, all to take a risk on a highly-experimental project that may or may not pan out.
True to the spirit of Dogecoin's history of charity (funding an Olympic Jamaican bobsled team, building wells for villagers in Africa, sponsoring NASCAR's "Dogecar"), an alternate suggestion was floated: Proof of Charity.
Per Levine, PoC meant that "instead of sending your doge to an unspendable address you would send it to a multi-signature address that requires all the keyholders signing off in order to release the funds."
However, managing charity funds meant more responsibilities for maintainers of the project, and seeing as how the supply of $DOGE would surpass 100 billion before the end of 2014, removing some of it from circulation didn't seem like the worst idea.
It was settled: Proof of Burn would be the way to go, following in the footsteps of Counterparty.
The start of the burn was Aug 13, 2014; the 1st Dogeparty transaction consisted of sending 1k $DOGE to the burn address, with the sender receiving 1.5 $XDP in return.
Early burners paid approx. 666.7 DOGE (less than 14 cents at the time) per XDP, whereas later burners paid about 1000 DOGE per XDP.
$DOGE came pouring into the Burn Address, up to 5 million at a time (the limit per address). By the end of the burn period (Sep 17, 2014), over 1.85 billion DOGE had been burned for $XDP.
DDogepartyxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxw1dfzr still accounts for 1.27% of all Dogecoins, which is currently valued at almost $200 million.
The level of participation in the burn exceeded every expectation set by the developers & even the community itself. Dogeparty was a beast. But could it deliver?
https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-dogecoin-addresses.htmlWhat happened next was simply stunning: over 12,000 user-created tokens were made in the next 2 weeks! This was far more tokens than already existed on Counterparty after 8 months of operation.
After all, it only cost 0.5 $XDP to register your own token name (roughly $0.07 at the time), so they were being created in droves.
The 1st token, named LTBC, was a nod to Adam Levine's LTBCOIN. A divisible token, it came with an issuance of 1 and has never been transferred.
https://dogeparty.tokenscan.io/asset/LTBCAmong the tokens created on Day 1 of Dogeparty were those made by artist @littleshibeOG, who made one of his namesake that specified it was "to be used for future art projects", along with SUPERFUNCOIN and even DOGECOIN.
Other artists & early visionaries to issue tokens on Day 1 include @jp_janssen, creator of OLGA on Counterparty, and @wasthatawolf, who built some of the platform's early infrastructure, along with a forum dedicated to Dogeparty.
The most famous token to come out of the 1st week of Dogeparty is JOLLYROGER by @spiller_crypto, which was issued on Aug 19.
https://dogeparty.tokenscan.io/asset/JOLLYROGERWhat makes this token special is it was the 1st to specifically link to an image URL in its Description field upon issuance, making it a precursor to the modern NFT.
Today, JOLLYROGER is considered to be the holiest of Dogeparty grails.
Although it may have been a haphazard innovation, it set a precedent for tokens representing images, one that wasn't recognized for what it was at the time, and only really popularized over a year later, with the advent of NFTs on Ethereum.
Unfortunately, the project was about to run into some real problems: server issues, community backlash, lack of development, and fighting a prolonged fall into abandonment, which would eventually happen 2 years later.
But as we all know, this was not the real end.
We'll get into all of that next time, so stay tuned for Part II! 
