Dogecoin Carries 83.5 Percent of the Mining Budget It Shares With Litecoin: How to Check What Miners Earn per Day

Dogecoin and Litecoin are secured by the same machines, and Dogecoin pays by far the larger part of the bill. Over the past 24 hours the Dogecoin network issued 13.53 million new units, worth around $1.16 million as of Saturday evening. Litecoin produced 3,593.75 new LTC over the same period, or roughly $230,467. Of the joint pot that pays the scrypt miners, 83.5 percent therefore comes from Dogecoin and 16.5 percent from Litecoin.

That figure appears on no price chart, and it says more about the state of the network than any daily move. It can be recalculated in two minutes, and that is exactly what this article shows.

Merged mining: the same scrypt work counts on two chains at once

Merged mining means this: one machine solves a single cryptographic puzzle, and two separate blockchains both accept the result as valid work. The technical basis is AuxPoW, short for auxiliary proof of work. Dogecoin activated AuxPoW in September 2014 because its own computing power was too small at the time to defend the network against attack.

This works because both chains use the same method, scrypt. A device mining for Litecoin can submit its work a second time to Dogecoin without burning any extra electricity. The miner earns twice; the power bill stays the same.

For Dogecoin that produces a property almost never mentioned in public debate: the network does not produce its security, it rents it. Whoever runs the machines decides on the combined return of both chains, not on the return of either one alone.

Why raw hashrate misleads as a metric

The widely quoted hashrate swings sharply, because it is estimated from the number of blocks found rather than measured directly. Two queries minutes apart on Saturday evening returned values between 2.76 and 3.98 petahash per second. The reliable figure is therefore not the hashrate but the number of blocks actually found, because that is recorded immutably on the chain.

1,353 blocks in 24 hours: Dogecoin issues 13.53 million DOGE a day

Dogecoin has paid a fixed reward of 10,000 DOGE per block since February 2015, and that reward never falls. The network targets one block per minute, or 1,440 a day. In the past 24 hours 1,353 blocks were actually found, one every 64 seconds on average. The sum is 1,353 times 10,000, and it comes to 13,530,000 new DOGE.

Litecoin works differently. There the reward halves every 840,000 blocks, currently standing at 6.25 LTC, and the network targets one block every two and a half minutes. The 575 blocks found add up to 3,593.75 new LTC.

$230,467 for Litecoin, $1,163,634 for Dogecoin

Unit counts only turn into a budget once the price is applied. Dogecoin traded at $0.086 on Saturday evening, Litecoin at $64.13. That produces the following picture:

The factor between the two is 5.05. A machine serving both chains therefore earns a good five sixths of its return at Dogecoin. The figures come from the public block explorer Blockchair, which discloses block count, reward and supply for each chain.

Tail emission with no cap: 3.16 percent new DOGE a year

The same sum that flows to the miners is also the supply that can hit the market fresh every day. Projected over a year that comes to 4.94 billion DOGE. Against a circulating supply of 156.27 billion units, that equals dilution of 3.16 percent a year.

The technical term for this model is tail emission, a permanent payout with no end date. Bitcoin halves its payout every four years and stops at 21 million units. Dogecoin has neither a halving nor a cap. Anyone holding DOGE holds a share that is arithmetically diluted by a good three percent each year unless they keep buying.

Unlike chains with staking, the Dogecoin protocol offers no way to take part in that payout. The 13.53 million units of the day go entirely to the miners. Offers that nevertheless promise a running yield on DOGE are lending arrangements with a provider and carry that provider's default risk, as the terms of the staking and lending platforms have to disclose.

Transaction fees cover 0.054 percent of the issuance

A network can pay its miners two ways: out of newly created units or out of user fees. At Dogecoin the second route barely registers. The 17,606 transactions of the past 24 hours cost an average of 0.41 DOGE, so about 7,256 DOGE or roughly $624 in total. Measured against the $1.16 million from issuance, that is 0.054 percent.

Litecoin hardly does better at 0.21 percent, on close to four times the fee volume. Both chains therefore depend entirely on new money. For Dogecoin that dependency means something very concrete: if the price falls, the security budget falls in the same proportion, and there is no fee market to cushion it.

What has been added since the futures-market finding of 9 October

On 9 October this newsroom showed that 94 percent of Dogecoin liquidations hit long positions. That was a snapshot of the futures market. Since then the price has recovered 1.64 percent to $0.086, with a daily range between $0.0848 and $0.0866. The numbers in this article sit one layer below that and move far more slowly: the security budget does not follow the leverage of individual traders, it falls out of block count multiplied by price.

Litecoin halving at block 3,360,000: Dogecoin's share rises to 91 percent

The next halving at Litecoin cuts the reward from 6.25 to 3.125 LTC. It falls due at block 3,360,000. On Saturday evening the chain stood at 3,192,901 blocks, leaving 167,099 to go. At 575 blocks a day that is around 291 days, so roughly the end of July 2027.

If both prices stay where they are, Litecoin's contribution then drops to about $115,000 a day, and Dogecoin's share of the joint budget climbs from 83.5 to around 91 percent. The dependency then runs almost entirely one way: Litecoin draws a growing part of its security from the issuance of a chain it does not control.

OP_CHECKZKP remains a draft: DogeOS runs through a permissioned sequencer

Since 30 September 2026 a public testnet called DogeOS has been running, intended to bring Ethereum-style applications to Dogecoin. In the project's own account, Dogecoin miners are one day meant to help secure those applications. According to the reporting by CoinDesk on 1 October, that remains a plan rather than a state of affairs.

It would require a protocol change named OP_CHECKZKP, which would let Dogecoin nodes verify cryptographic proofs. The proposal dates from July 2025, the submitted implementation is a draft with a placeholder where the actual verifier should sit, and there is no activation date. The testnet is currently secured by a permissioned operator that sets transaction order, plus shielded hardware and an oversight body.

For investors in Europe that draws a clear line: no DogeOS mainnet exists, and no date for one has ever been named. Any offer to bridge real DOGE to a supposed DogeOS mainnet, or to buy a DogeOS token in advance, therefore cannot be genuine. Holding your balance in self-custody is the best protection against that scam.

Payments: 17,606 Dogecoin transactions against 165,516 at Litecoin

The second chain uses the same computing work and still carries 9.4 times the transactions. That puts a widespread image into perspective. Dogecoin is considerably larger than Litecoin by market value at $13.44 billion, but it is the smaller of the two chains in daily payments.

For the miners that makes no difference, because fees barely matter on either chain. For judging the network it matters a great deal: the demand carrying Dogecoin is trading demand, not payment demand. Buying DOGE through a regulated trading venue means acquiring an asset whose chain sees little everyday use.

Our view: rented security for $1.16 million a day

In the newsroom's view, the Dogecoin payout is read too one-sidedly as pure dilution. The measurement shows that this $1.16 million a day does buy something, namely 83.5 percent of the budget that pays for the security of two chains. That is the part that can be evidenced.

Against it stands the construction itself. The security is rented rather than earned, the tenants can leave at any time, and with a 0.054 percent fee share there is no second pillar should the price give way. After the Litecoin halving next summer, that position worsens arithmetically. This is an assessment of the chain, not a recommendation to buy or sell: the holding remains a high-risk asset in which total loss is possible.

Dogecoin mining: 83.5 percent of the budget comes from issuance

Three steps to retrace what you have read in two minutes:

1. Read the block count yourself. Open a public block explorer and find the field for blocks over the past 24 hours. Multiply the value by 10,000 and you have the daily issuance in DOGE. Times the current price, that gives the miners' daily budget.
2. Run the same sum for Litecoin. There the factor is 6.25 instead of 10,000. The ratio of the two results shows which chain pays for the shared computing work. Where to compare both values and trade them is set out in our overview of crypto trading venues.
3. Separate your own custody. Because the protocol knows no yield, any DOGE interest sits with a provider rather than in the chain. If you would rather avoid that, hold your own keys, and the devices for it are in our hardware wallet comparison.

(As of October 10, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)