Kabosu, the Dogecoin dog, is dead

Kabuso. Das letzte Bild, das Atsuko Sato auf ihrem Blog von der Hündin veröffentlichte. Für dieses Blog zurechtgeschnitten.

The Dogecoin Community is in Mourning: Kabosu, the Japanese Shiba Inu that Inspired the „Doge“ Meme, Has Passed Away at 18.

Legends may be immortal in spirit, but they, too, must eventually succumb to the inevitable fate of all living beings.

This holds true for Kabosu, the internet’s most famous dog. The Shiba Inu of a Japanese teacher passed away on May 24 at the venerable age of 18 due to leukemia and liver failure.

In a poignant poem, her owner, Atsuko Sato, describes the last days of the dog. She ate rice, basked in the sunlight on the windowsill, and watched the birds in the garden. She passed away in the morning while being petted by her owner. Kabosu was the happiest dog in the world—and Atsuko the happiest dog owner in the world.

The comments on Sato’s blog are filled with sorrow: „Kabosu, I can’t stop crying. I will never forget you.“

Kabosu’s career as a meme dog began in 2010, about two years after the teacher adopted her. Mrs. Sato published a photo of the dog with her paws crossed on the sofa. For some reason – no one knows exactly why – the image spread across online forums and became a meme, turning Kabosu into the internet dog, Doge.

The memes usually feature pictures of Kabosu with text expressing her thoughts in broken English. Typically, the format is: „Very Winter, much frosty, many ice, wow.“

At the end of 2013, programmer Jackson Palmer, then at Adobe, developed Dogecoin. The coin was a fork of Litecoin, featuring more monetary units and a lottery function in the block reward. Palmer explicitly created Dogecoin as a joke, more or less to poke fun at Bitcoin enthusiasts, their greed, and their ideological seriousness. With Dogecoin, anyone could become a millionaire in jest: „How Money, So crypto, Many Coins, Much Wow!“

Dogecoin unexpectedly became a hit. Even after Palmer left the crypto community in 2015, Dogecoin forums and communities remained active. People posted funny memes, gifted each other hundreds of thousands of Dogecoins, and exuded a funny, lighthearted energy that was refreshingly different from the often dour Bitcoin scene.

To everyone’s astonishment, Dogecoin proved more resilient and enduring than many, many other coins from the same era. Hundreds of altcoins emerged in late 2013 and early 2014, at least 95 percent of which have since sunk into complete obscurity. Dogecoin somehow survived and maintained a relatively favorable ranking among cryptocurrencies. A meme is more than just fun—it has intrinsic value.

A milestone came in 2021, when none other than Elon Musk touted Dogecoin as „the people’s cryptocurrency“ and his favorite coin. After Musk took over Twitter, he even briefly replaced the Twitter icon with the Dogecoin logo—Kabosu’s face. By then, Mrs. Sato, now 62, was not particularly surprised. She had grown accustomed to her dog’s widespread fame.

In a park in the Japanese city of Sakura, there is even a statue of Mrs. Sato and Kabosu, funded by a crowdfunding campaign last November. Sato and her allies have donated to charities in the spirit of the kind and playful Doge ideology; the largest crypto donation of one million dollars to Save the Children was, unsurprisingly, made in Dogecoin.

At this point, one can only wish the teacher all the best and find joy in living in a world where a friendly, playful dog became so beloved simply for existing—and enriched the crypto world with positive energy and the genre of memecoins.

Or, to quote another comment on Sato’s blog: „Kabosu, thank you so much! You were born to bring love to everyone in the world. I have loved you forever. Enjoy running and playing in the rainbow land.“