Dogecoin was started as a joke by two software engineers.
Sakura, Japan:
With her cute face now fragile, Kabosu still sports the enigmatic smile that made her millennials’ favorite meme dog and inspired a $23 billion cryptocurrency beloved by Elon Musk.
She’s best known as the Dogecoin logo, but for Atsuko Sato, Kabosu is the former rescue puppy who accompanies her to work at the kindergarten every day.
“It was so strange” to discover his dog was an internet celebrity, Sato told AFP in Sakura, where Tokyo’s eastern sprawl gives way to rice fields and solar panels.
In 2010, two years after adopting the shiba inu, Sato posted a photo on his blog of Kabosu crossing his paws on the couch and giving a seductive look at the camera.
That image became the “Doge” meme — and later an NFT digital artwork that sold for $4 million.
“She’s making a weird face,” Sato laughed. “Now I think she looks very pretty” in the famous photo, but “at first I thought she might be in the trash.”
The meme grew from a post on an online forum to an anarchic inside joke that made the jump from college dorm rooms to office emails.
Photo credit: AFP
“One of my friends texted me: ‘Isn’t that picture Kabosu?’ So I searched and found all kinds of memes, like Kabosu turning into a donut,” Sato said.
The 62-year-old is now so used to “unbelievable” events that when Tesla boss Musk changed his Twitter icon, now X, to Kabosu’s face last year, she “wasn’t even that surprised.”
“In recent years I managed to connect the online version of Kabosu, all these unexpected things seen from a distance, with our real life.”
‘Mona Lisa of the internet’
Kabosu spends most days resting in a stroller at kindergarten or on a large cushion at home, where fan-made Doge tributes adorn the walls.
The memes typically use silly, broken English to reveal the inner thoughts of Kabosu and other “doge” shiba inu – usually pronounced like pizza “dough” but with a “j” at the end.
“So much love. What a star, OMG. So much heart. So much drawing,” reads a framed print using the signature “doge speak.”
Kabosu fell ill with leukemia and liver disease in late 2022, and Sato is certain that the “invisible power” of prayers from fans around the world helped her pull through.
Then, in November last year, a $100,000 statue of Kabosu and his couch, crowdfunded by Own The Doge, a crypto organization dedicated to the meme, was unveiled in a park in Sakura.
Sato and Own The Doge have also donated large sums to international charities, including over $1 million to Save the Children. The NGO claims this is “the largest crypto contribution” it has ever received.
“The Doge is the most popular dog of the modern era,” said Tridog, a pseudonymous member of Own The Doge, describing Kabosu as “the Mona Lisa of the internet.”
‘Popular cryptocurrency’
Dogecoin was started as a joke by two software engineers and is now the eighth most valuable cryptocurrency in the world with a market value of $23 billion.
“The Doge meme was really big on the internet in 2013 and I spent a lot of time on Reddit and other forums at that time,” Dogecoin co-founder Billy Markus told AFP.
Markus, who is no longer affiliated with Dogecoin, was amused by the “silliness and innocence” of the memes.
Fellow founder Jackson Palmer “drank a beer and saw the Doge and Bitcoin meme in the news and thought saying he was going to invest in Dogecoin would make a funny tweet,” he said.
Markus thought the idea was “hilarious” and created the coin in “a few hours” before contacting Palmer and putting it live.
“A lot of strange things happened after that,” he said.
Photo credit: AFP
Since then, Dogecoin has been backed by hip-hop king Snoop Dogg, “Shark Tank” manager Mark Cuban and Kiss bassist Gene Simmons, who once tweeted, “I bought Dogecoin…six figures.”
But its biggest supporter is probably billionaire Musk, who plays with the currency on X – causing its value to rise – and hails it as “the people’s crypto”.
Dogecoin has also inspired a plethora of other cheap and highly volatile “memecoins,” including spin-off Shiba Inu and others based on dogs, cats or Donald Trump.
– ‘The legend lives on’ –
A lone figure wearing a Doge mask looks out at the Los Angeles skyline – this is Tridog, who says he has “been working on a dog photograph for almost three years.”
Own The Doge is his full-time job, and he preaches his motto DOGE, or “Do Only Good Every Day.”
In 2021, Sato sold Kabosu’s viral photo as a non-fungible token (NFT), a certificate of digital ownership that can be traded online, to a group of crypto art collectors called PleasrDAO for $4.2 million.
That makes it “one of the five most expensive photos ever sold,” Tridog told AFP.
PleasrDAO split the value of the NFT into an entirely new memecoin called $DOG, allowing many people to collectively “own” the meme.
Own The Doge brought fans and other meme stars to Japan to meet Kabosu and Sato, and recently secured the intellectual property rights to the famous photo, paving the way for the manufacture of Doge toys, films and other products.
As a rescue dog, Kabosu’s true birthday is unknown, but Sato estimates his age at 18 years old – beyond the average lifespan of a shiba inu.
When Kabosu dies, “the world will mourn,” Tridog said, but “a legend always lives on.”
He hopes people remember the “deeper values” behind the Doge meme: “the wholesomeness, the silliness, not taking yourself too seriously.”
(Except the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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