DogeOS Opens Public Testnet, Bringing EVM Apps to Dogecoin

DogeOS has opened its public testnet, giving developers an EVM-compatible environment to build applications on Dogecoin, the company announced on September 30. The project was founded by the team behind MyDoge, a Dogecoin wallet, and had previously run a limited-access testnet.

"The testnet gives builders a place to turn ideas for Dogecoin into working applications," said Jordan Jefferson, founder and CEO of DogeOS. He added that teams in the ecosystem are "tackling the pieces DOGE has been missing: markets, financial tools, games and more."

The initial lineup is weighted towards DeFi. Barkswap is building a liquidity engine, Superposition Finance a lending protocol, Derps a perpetuals exchange and Split Markets non-liquidatable options. USDoge is a stablecoin using a collateralised debt position model, Snag aggregates prediction markets, and Anoncoin and Starbase are token launchpads. On the consumer side, Doge Escape, PlaysOut and DogeFundMe are building games and crowdfunding apps.

DogeOS has also secured an endorsement from the Dogecoin Foundation. "This is a new chapter in the Dogecoin story," said Timothy Stebbing, a director of the foundation. "L1 ledger purity must stay intact while we introduce utility one layer above, and that is what DogeOS represents to me."

That framing matters because Dogecoin's base layer has no smart contracts, and earlier efforts to bolt them on did not win the community's backing. Dogechain, launched in 2022, was a separate EVM chain running on bridged DOGE with no formal link to the foundation.

DogeOS is a ZK-rollup that uses DOGE for gas. For Dogecoin itself to check the rollup's proofs, though, the network needs an upgrade. In July 2025 the DogeOS team posted a draft proposal for OP_CHECKZKP, a soft fork that would repurpose the unused OP_NOP10 opcode to let Dogecoin scripts verify Groth16 zero-knowledge proofs natively. The proposal remains a draft under discussion, with community members raising concerns over trusted setups, quantum resistance and whether L2 demand justifies the added complexity.

Neither the release nor DogeOS's developer documentation gives a mainnet date. DOGE was trading at about $0.095 at the time of writing, with a market cap of roughly $14.8 billion, according to CoinGecko.