The Lowdown on Dogecoin’s Anticipated Upgrade

Crypto enthusiast Doge Whisperer announced the release plan for Dogecoin upgrade 1.46.6, which includes better wallet protection and improved address message handling.

As much of the $1.3 trillion crypto market goes through a bearish winter following the collapse of the TerraUSD stablecoin and threats of a global recession, there is good news on the horizon for Elon Musk’s “pet” memecoin, DOGE.

Announcements made by crypto enthusiast Doge Whisperer and Dogecoin News suggest that DOGE’s upgrade to 1.46.4 is imminent, with improved wallet protection and better handling of address messages among the “MUST HAVE.”

Doge Whisperer posted the upgrade’s rollout schedule on Twitter and a GitHub link to DOGE’s source code repository. In the tweet, they praised the dev team behind the upgrade, “Way to build team,” while acknowledging the author of the rollout plan Patrick Lodder.

What’s new for Dogecoin

In addition to wallet protection and better address message handling, Lodder has promised that a known bitcoin vulnerability will be fixed. The Dogecoin Core wallet, the Dogecoin foundation’s official desktop wallet, will be cheaper. At the same time, a Gitian script will be released to allow future updates. Gitian scripts enable multiple developers to create identical executables, all signed by multiple parties, to ensure that the executables use the same source code. It removes the chance of errors occurring during executable creation and distribution.

Lodder also includes “SHOULD HAVE” goals in the timeline, such as a dependency update and “an important cleanup.” These, Lodder says, the dev team needs to do their best to merge.

Other non-critical issues falling under the “COULD HAVE” category are cleaning up code warnings when code compiles (turning human-understandable code to code that a computer can understand) and improving ease of use.

Dogecoin developers include lead maintainer Ross Nicoll, Michi Lumin, Lodder, and Escanor Liones.

Musk’s advice to developers

In a recent Twitter exchange with Dogecoin co-founder Billy Markus, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said he believes that DOGE has “potential” as a currency. He noted that developers should focus on lowering transaction fees, reducing the time it takes to validate a block of transactions, and increasing the number of transactions in a block. Dogecoin’s current block time is one minute, compared to 10 minutes for bitcoin.

Musk has been a vocal proponent of DOGE, making announcements that have sent the cryptocurrency soaring on multiple occasions. The most recent surge in price came after an announcement that Musk had become a Twitter shareholder. He went on to agree to buy the social media company but, at the time of writing, threatened to withdraw his offer because the company hadn’t disclosed the extent of its problem with spam bots.