Dogecoin is getting a dedicated company to build out its ecosystem. More than a decade after the coin launched in 2013 as a lighthearted, meme-inspired cryptocurrency, the teams behind its biggest consumer products are folding into a single organization, Dogecoin Labs, with the aim of giving DOGE more everyday uses.

Announced Tuesday, Dogecoin Labs was formed together with the Dogecoin Foundation to consolidate the products, intellectual property, and development teams scattered across the Dogecoin world into one independent outfit. The new company will own and operate three flagship products: the MyDoge wallet, the DogeOS app platform, and Such App, a merchant-payments tool, with assets and talent contributed by both the Foundation and House of Doge, the Foundation's corporate arm.

Led by CEO Jordan Jefferson, the founder of MyDoge and DogeOS, the company frames the mismatch as Dogecoin's defining weakness. Despite ranking among the largest and most recognizable cryptocurrencies — with deep liquidity, millions of holders, and one of crypto's most active communities — the number of actual products and businesses built on DOGE remains small relative to that audience.

Closing that gap is the pitch. Dogecoin Labs plans to build out a range of applications spanning wallets, payments, commerce, trading, DeFi, gaming, AI, and social.

"No other digital asset has Dogecoin's combination of liquidity, community and cultural reach, and its potential has barely been tapped," Jefferson said. He added that the community has chanted "DOGE to $1" for years and that the goal now is "to build the economy that ambition calls for."

The move builds on recent groundwork. DogeOS opened its public testnet on Sept. 30, giving developers an Ethereum-compatible environment in which to build Dogecoin apps — a notable addition for a proof-of-work network whose base layer does not natively support smart contracts — while MyDoge, which grew past 500,000 users without paid acquisition, rolled out a V3 update connecting the wallet to those applications. Together with Such App's merchant rails, the three products are meant to link developers, consumers, and businesses into a functioning DOGE economy. How quickly DogeOS advances from testnet toward a production launch, and how many merchants sign on through Such App, will serve as early markers of whether that economy takes shape.

Under the new structure, the Dogecoin Foundation will continue its existing work on stewardship, open-source support, and advocacy, while Dogecoin Labs takes charge of commercial product development. The split follows a structure common across the crypto industry, where nonprofit foundations steward open-source protocols while affiliated companies take on product development and commercialization.

The reorganization arrives during a soft stretch for the token. DOGE traded around $0.084 on Tuesday, up 3.9% on the day for a roughly $13 billion market cap. Still, the price is down about 14% over the past month and sits roughly 88% below its May 2021 record high.

Dogecoin's institutional story has been mixed as well. A Dogecoin Foundation-backed 21Shares DOGE ETF launched on Nasdaq earlier this year, though Bitwise later shut its own Dogecoin fund, citing low demand and a need to "optimize its product range to meet evolving investor needs."