Bitcoin‘s (CRYPTO: BTC) price has more than doubled during the past 12 months and is hovering near its all-time high. The approvals of its first spot price exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in January, its halving in April, two interest rate cuts, and Trump’s election victory brought back a stampede of bulls.

But Dogecoin (CRYPTO: DOGE) — which was originally created in 2013 as a parody of Bitcoin and named after a Shiba Inu dog — more than quadrupled during the past 12 months. In the past, Dogecoin’s price was often driven by Elon Musk’s unpredictable tweets about the cryptocurrency. He even made Dogecoin acceptable for payment at his car company, Tesla, for certain purchases in 2022.

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Dogecoin’s latest rally was mainly fueled by Trump’s election victory. The rally amped up after Trump said he would appoint Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the planned Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to root out wasteful government spending. That news — along with Trump’s pro-crypto stance — helped Dogecoin outperform Bitcoin. So should investors buy this smaller meme coin instead of Bitcoin today?

Dogecoin was created from the open source code for Litecoin, another token that was previously forked, or split off, from Bitcoin’s blockchain. Just like Bitcoin and Litecoin, Dogecoin’s tokens were mined with the energy-intensive proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism. But to differentiate itself from other PoW tokens, Dogecoin’s developers launched a new hashing algorithm called Scrypt, which consumed less power and processed transactions at a faster rate.

That upgrade attracted the attention of online supporters, who dubbed themselves the “Doge Army,” as well as high-profile investors like Musk, Mark Cuban, Snoop Dogg, Kevin Jonas, and Gene Simmons. As a result, Dogecoin’s price soared to an all-time high of $0.73 on May 8, 2021 — which represented a 47,279% gain from its earliest trading price of $0.001540753 on Jan. 23, 2014. That rally would have turned a $10,000 investment into $4.7 million.

But today, that same investment would be worth about $2.4 million. Two major challenges prevented Dogecoin from becoming the next Bitcoin or Ethereum. First, Dogecoin is an inflationary token that doesn’t have a supply cap. There are 150 billion Dogecoins in circulation as of this writing, and that supply is growing by about 10,000 tokens per minute. Bitcoin has a maximum supply of 21 million tokens, and 19.8 million of those tokens have already been mined. That scarcity makes Bitcoin more similar to gold and other physical assets than Dogecoin.

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