More like 4th, given that Ripples can't be mined, is controlled by a single entity, most of the existing coins are not freely circulating, and the transaction volume is consistently so tiny that it looks very much like the price is intentionally manipulated to make the coin look desirable.

More like 3rd. In the 8 hours since vidarh posted this, Dogecoin surpassed the Peercoin market cap. The 24h trading volume of Dogecoin is also nearly 6x that of Peercoin right now.

Really that means nothing though. Neither Peercoin or Dogecoin have merchant or payment processor support. No one is interested in taking dogecoin in payment for goods and services, right now it is just a toy coin that people can use to learn about cryptocurrencies cheaply and that is pretty much what it will always be. If dogecoin had a maleability issue it does not have the dev support to resolve it in a reasonable time frame, a fork like there was in BTC last year would have a similar result. There are lost of transactions because you can send 10 or 100 or 1000 coins to anyone and you still have sent less than a few bucks. Lots of transactions does not equal a big currency it equals a lot of transactions. And in this situation these transactions count for very little economic activity.