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Though he remained silent for much of dogecoin’s meteoric rise over the past year, the token’s cofounder Jackson Palmer broke his silence Wednesday afternoon to rail against cryptocurrencies in a flurry of tweets, providing a rare glimpse into his long and tumultuous history with the nascent space that has grown nearly 300-fold since he abandoned it years ago.

One of dogecoin’s two cofounders said the crypto market is… [+] controlled by a “powerful cartel of affluent persons” in a rare return to Twitter.
courtesy of Getty Images

Palmer, who was born in Australia and was one of two software developers who created the enormously popular token as a joke in 2013, began his 10-tweet rant by declaring that after years of studying cryptocurrencies, he feels it is a “inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology.”

Palmer bemoaned the crypto market’s recent rebound, alleging it is “dominated by a powerful cartel of affluent persons,” and appeared to poke fun at Tesla CEO and self-proclaimed “Dogefather” Elon Musk, saying retail investors were sold a “false promise of one day becoming a fellow billionaire.”

Palmer has been relatively quiet online and in the media since early 2015, when he ceased working on dogecoin and declared on Twitter a “extended leave of absence” from the cryptocurrency industry, calling it “toxic and frankly, stagnant,” according to his LinkedIn page.

In now-deleted tweets, Palmer labeled the excitement over cryptocurrency’s investment potential “worrying” when the market capitalization of dogecoin first surpassed $1 billion in 2018.

Palmer said in a 2018 interview that he abandoned what could have been a dogecoin fortune when he left in 2014, saying he “didn’t come away with any money.”

He reportedly referred to Musk as a “self-absorbed grifter” when Tesla stopped accepting bitcoin as a form of payment in May, causing a broad sell-off from which the cryptocurrency market has yet to recover.

Palmer and Billy Markus invented dogecoin in December 2013 to mock the enormously popular Doge meme (of a Shiba Inu dog) and the burgeoning cryptocurrency business (bitcoin itself was not even five years old). In 2018, Palmer commented, “It was always like a passion endeavor, like a side project thing.” Despite leaving the project in 2015, Markus has fully embraced the dogecoin meme. Markus, who now has over 400,000 followers on Twitter, says he sold and gave away all of his dogecoin holdings at the time, but he’s since bought some more. In June, he tweeted, “I acquired dogecoin after eight years of vowing never to buy crypto again, an hour ago.”
“These days, even the mildest criticism of cryptocurrencies will elicit slander from the industry’s top figures, as well as the wrath of regular investors who have been given the false promise of one day becoming a fellow millionaire,” Palmer tweeted on Wednesday. “It’s nearly hard to have a good-faith debate.”
Dogecoin’s price has plummeted about 75% from an all-time high on May 8, the night of Musk’s Saturday Night Live debut, despite having gained roughly 1,500% this year. The cryptocurrency had a market capitalization of more than $93 billion at its height.
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