How Dogecoin mines a block

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Time is compressed: a one-minute block takes about eight seconds here at 1×. Click a step on the right, or use the arrow keys, to jump to it.

Entering the mempool

waiting in the mempool in the Dogecoin block template the Litecoin block that carries it scrypt hashing, and a block just found verified, on the Dogecoin chain real transaction entering the mempool a real Dogecoin block, just found the same work also made a Litecoin block on the chain, gaining confirmations inner ring: mining pools, symbolic

A wallet hands a signed transaction to one node, which checks it and relays it to its peers. Within seconds nearly every node holds it in its mempool. Fees are small: the median in late September 2026 was about 0.1 DOGE, around a US cent.
A pool fills a Dogecoin block from its mempool, best fee per byte first, up to 1 MB. It also builds a Litecoin block, and writes the Dogecoin block's hash into the Litecoin coinbase behind the marker fabe6d6d. One 80-byte Litecoin header now commits to both blocks.
Miners hash that Litecoin header with scrypt, a memory-hungry function, changing the nonce each time. Nonce 00000000 gives …. Each result is checked against two targets. Dogecoin's is about 2.6 times easier to hit than Litecoin's, because its blocks come every minute instead of every 2.5.
The pool sends the Dogecoin block to its network with the proof attached: the Litecoin header, its coinbase, and two Merkle branches. This is AuxPoW, auxiliary proof of work. Sometimes the same hash also beats Litecoin's target, and the identical work mints a Litecoin block too.
Every Dogecoin node checks that the coinbase is in the Litecoin header's Merkle tree, that the Dogecoin block's hash is under the marker in its assigned slot, and that the scrypt hash of the header is below Dogecoin's target. Then it checks every transaction itself.
Dogecoin resets its difficulty after every block. DigiShield takes the last block's time, moves only an eighth of the way from 60 seconds toward it, and sets the next target from that. Each block on top is another confirmation; exchanges commonly wait for 20 to 60.

Pools don't publish the hashes they try, so live mode shows each block when api.bitcore.io's node has it, then checks its real AuxPoW proof in your browser.

How the latest block proved its work Waiting for a block

How this is checked

Your browser downloads the newest block from Blockchair, including its AuxPoW data, and repeats Dogecoin's checks: it finds the merged-mining marker in the Litecoin coinbase, climbs both Merkle branches with SHA-256, works out the expected slot from the coinbase nonce, and runs scrypt on the 80-byte Litecoin header to compare it with both targets. Blockchair's free API allows few requests, so this is fetched at most once every two minutes.

Difficulty, block by block Waiting for the first block

raised after a fast block
lowered after a slow one

Block chain 0 tx in the mempool 0 PH/s 0 M difficulty 0 s per block 0 B DOGE issued

The parts that make this work

Scrypt proof of work

Dogecoin started in December 2013 as a fork of Luckycoin, itself a Litecoin fork, and kept Litecoin's proof of work: scrypt with N = 1024, r = 1, p = 1. Scrypt runs the header through PBKDF2 and Salsa20/8, filling and then reading back a 128 KiB scratchpad in an order that depends on the data, so each attempt needs memory as well as arithmetic. The aim was to keep mining on ordinary computers; scrypt ASICs arrived anyway in 2014, and today's network runs on them. A block is valid if the scrypt hash of its header, read as a number, is below the target. In late September 2026 the network makes about 2.4 quadrillion attempts a second, 2.4 PH/s.

Merged mining with Litecoin

In 2014 Dogecoin's hashrate was small enough that someone renting scrypt power could have rewritten its history. From block 371,337, on 11 September 2014, Dogecoin accepts auxiliary proof of work: a block may prove its work with the header of a block from another scrypt chain, almost always Litecoin, as long as that block commits to the Dogecoin block. A pool builds both blocks, puts the Dogecoin hash in the Litecoin coinbase and hashes the Litecoin header. Any result below Dogecoin's target makes a Dogecoin block; a result also below Litecoin's target makes a Litecoin block as well. The miner pays for the electricity once and is paid twice, so most of Litecoin's hashrate, about 2.4 PH/s, also secures Dogecoin. Over 99.9 % of recent Dogecoin blocks are merge-mined; a direct, non-AuxPoW block turns up only every few days.

What the AuxPoW proof contains

A merge-mined Dogecoin block has a zero nonce in its own header and carries five extra things: the parent coinbase transaction, a Merkle branch linking it to the parent header's Merkle root, the root of a small "chain Merkle tree" of auxiliary block hashes, a branch from the Dogecoin hash up to that root, and the 80-byte parent header. The coinbase holds the four bytes fa be 6d 6d ("mm"), then the root, the tree size and a nonce. Each chain's slot in the tree is derived from that nonce and the chain's ID (Dogecoin's is 0x0062, also visible in its block version), so a pool can merge-mine several chains at once but can't hide two Dogecoin blocks in one header. Nodes also refuse a parent with Dogecoin's own chain ID.

DigiShield: a retarget every block

Bitcoin and Litecoin retarget every 2,016 blocks. With multipools hopping on and off in early 2014, that left Dogecoin stuck with blocks minutes apart or seconds apart, so from block 145,000 it adopted DigiShield, first written for DigiByte. After each block, the time it took is damped: modulated = 60 + (actual − 60) ÷ 8 seconds, clamped between 45 and 90. The next target is the old one scaled by modulated ÷ 60. A three-second block raises difficulty by about 13 %; a three-minute block lowers it by about 20 %. Difficulty therefore jumps around block to block (between about 25 and 68 million over forty blocks on 1 October 2026) while averaging near one block a minute.

One-minute blocks, forks and confirmations

Nodes follow the chain with the most accumulated work, summed from each block's target. Blocks a minute apart leave less slack for propagation than Bitcoin's ten, so two pools sometimes find competing blocks at the same height; nodes keep the first one they saw until the next block settles it, and the loser's transactions return to the mempool. Finality is probabilistic. Each block on top makes a reversal harder, and because the work is shared with Litecoin, rewriting Dogecoin means out-hashing most of the scrypt network. Exchanges set their own bar for deposits, commonly 20 to 60 confirmations, which is 20 minutes to an hour.

10,000 DOGE a block, with no cap

Early Dogecoin paid a random reward per block, then a halving schedule; since block 600,000 in February 2015 every block pays exactly 10,000 DOGE plus its fees, forever. That is about 5.26 billion new DOGE a year. With roughly 156 billion in circulation on 1 October 2026 (CoinGecko), new issuance is about 3.4 % a year and falls each year in percentage terms, because the amount stays fixed while the supply grows. Litecoin pays its own reward, 6.25 LTC a block, to the same pools for the same work.

Fees and the mempool

Dogecoin has 1 MB blocks and no SegWit, and most blocks hold a handful of transactions, so block space is rarely scarce. Since version 1.14.5 Dogecoin Core recommends a minimum fee of 0.01 DOGE per kilobyte, and since 1.14.6 a dust limit of 0.01 DOGE; wallets usually pay more. The block's miner collects the fees, though a quiet block's fees are well under one DOGE next to its 10,000 DOGE subsidy. Dogecoin's coins are still the Bitcoin-style unspent outputs, so a transaction spends whole earlier outputs and pays change back to itself.

Who mines Dogecoin

Mining is done by large scrypt pools that merge-mine Litecoin, Dogecoin and often several smaller scrypt chains in the same tree. The pool tag is usually written in the Litecoin coinbase rather than Dogecoin's, which is why the proof panel reads it from there; tags such as F2Pool and ViaBTC appear in the blocks of 1 October 2026, while many pools write no readable tag. Pools coordinate hashrate but don't own it: members can point their machines elsewhere in minutes.

What live mode shows

Live mode reads recent blocks and the chain tip from BitPay's public Bitcore API, about every 30 seconds, and unconfirmed transactions from BlockCypher, about every 45 seconds; both send CORS headers and need no key. Each new block flashes in the inner ring with its real height, transaction count and fees, and the difficulty chart is the real one, block by block. For the newest block, at most every two minutes, your browser fetches the raw AuxPoW data from Blockchair and verifies it with its own SHA-256 and scrypt code, including whether the same work also made a Litecoin block. The inner ring of pools and the outer ring of nodes are symbolic, and the propagation wave is drawn, not measured. Polling pauses while the tab is hidden.

What the animation simplifies

Time is compressed about sevenfold: a one-minute block takes eight or nine seconds. Real pools each build their own templates and never stop hashing, and most of their scrypt hashes are submitted as low-difficulty shares to the pool, not to either network. The step-by-step pools, their shares and the block intervals are illustrative, but the step-by-step difficulty follows the real DigiShield formula and the hashes shown while hashing are real scrypt outputs for a sample header. Read Dogecoin's AuxPoW code and difficulty code, or the merged mining specification, for the full rules.