Elon Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency made a comeback at the end of last year as retail investors flooded back into the market to snap up Dogecoin. The coin was launched as a joke in 2013, but has persisted over the years and remained prominent.

But just how serious is the business of mining the O.G. meme coin? People are actively buying the machines to do so, according to vendors at this year’s Mining Disrupt conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. 

Though the conference was heavily focused on the established business of Bitcoin mining—which is headlined by major, publicly traded firms and backed by President Trump—coins like DOGE and Litecoin (LTC) also require proof-of-work mining and reward miners for supporting each chain.

In fact, the machines that mine such alternative PoW cryptocurrencies often mine them at the same time—technically dubbed “merged mining”—which lets them boost their earnings. Vendors said that miners of all stripes, from solo participants all the way up to public companies, are showing interest in order to earn a bit of extra cash.

“Mining DOGE or LTC can help miners maximize revenue,” said Payne Cong, head of business development at ElphaPex.

And Alan Martinez from hardware maker JSBIT told Decrypt that while the miners could potentially earn $750 per month mining DOGE on just one of the nearly silent machines, big mining companies are also showing interest in snapping up the money makers. 

“We’re talking with large firms—listed on the Nasdaq—who are interested,” he said.

Case in point: Last year, the Nasdaq-listed VivoPower (VVPR) announced that its subsidiary Caret Digital would start mining Dogecoin and Litecoin.

Data from CoinWarz shows that right now, miners can make profits of $5.83 per day mining DOGE with one machine. Mining Bitcoin with one machine can, on average, reap operators rewards of $9.41 per day. 

Public American miner BIT Mining said in December that mining DOGE was a bigger cash cow for the company than the orange coin. Mining Bitcoin is becoming increasingly difficult for smaller players as mining difficulty increases and the price of the biggest digital asset takes a hit. 

DOGE gained a cult following after Tesla boss and now Trump advisor Musk started talking about the coin on X (formerly Twitter). Before that, the asset was largely seen as a big joke—but then it started to gain substantial value.

Musk recently praised the coin’s tokenomics. DOGE has an uncapped supply with 10,000 new coins minted every minute, and the tech billionaire has argued that this makes it good as a currency, instead of Bitcoin, which is largely touted as a “digital gold.” With its limited supply, Bitcoin is seen by many as a store of value rather than a coin that's worth spending like cash.

But big-time miners aren’t getting stuck in seriously—at least not yet. Martinez told Decrypt that so far, small businesses were the biggest customers, such as owners of cafes and office buildings.

He cited an example of an unnamed coffee shop chain that he said was mining Dogecoin at six of its sites, “almost” like a side hustle, taking advantage of the heat recapture as well. 

“Don’t turn on your heater—turn on your miner,” he said of DOGE mining's additional benefits. “When was the last time a heater paid you?”

Edited by Andrew Hayward