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The widely recognized Shiba Inu dog known as “Kabosu,” credited with sparking the Doge meme, Dogecoin, and one of the top-selling non-fungible token (NFT) artworks in 2021, has passed away.
Considered “one of the most iconic memes in internet history,” the dog reached the age of 17 before passing away in Sakura, Japan.
The news was shared through an Instagram post on May 24 by Atsuko Sato — the Japanese kindergarten teacher who rescued and adopted Kabosu back in 2008.
“Thank you all so much for loving Kabosu all these years. I am certain that Kabosu was the happiest dog in the world,” she wrote in her post.
Kabosu, boasting half a million followers on Instagram, quickly gained significant popularity, particularly within the Web3 community.
Kabosu skyrocketed to fame when a snapshot portraying the dog — originally posted on Sato’s personal blog in the early 2010s — quickly went viral, earning it the moniker of the “Doge” meme.
The meme later became the symbol for Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency initially conceived as a joke, which received multiple endorsements and promotions from Elon Musk.
In 2022, Dogecoin’s value spiked by 18% following Elon Musk’s announcement of Tesla accepting it as payment. Another notable event occurred in 2023, when Dogecoin saw a 25.69% surge within 24 hours after Elon Musk replaced Twitter’s classic bird logo with the meme cryptocurrency symbol in a post.
In November 2023, Dogecoin made headlines again when the director of “Conquest,” a science fiction series on Netflix, reportedly invested $4 million of the show’s budget in Dogecoin (DOGE), yielding a $27 million profit.
The meme was also turned into an NFT — the “Doge NFT (DOG)” — minted by Sato. This NFT fetched a remarkable $4 million at auction in 2021, setting a record for the most expensive meme NFT at that time.
While Kabosu’s journey from beloved dog to cultural phenomenon within Web3 was remarkable, it wasn’t the only one. In March, a viral photograph of another Shiba Inu named Archi, sporting a hat, became an internet meme and was minted as an NFT, ultimately selling for $4.3 million.
