Kabosu

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Kabosu
Image: photo via Wikipedia (Wikimedia Commons)
role	dog, meme subject
known for	the doge meme, the face of Dogecoin, the 4 million dollar Doge NFT

Kabosu was the Japanese Shiba Inu whose sideways glance became the doge meme and the face of Dogecoin; she died in May 2024 at approximately 18 years old.

Contents

1 Life
2 The doge meme
3 Later years and death
4 Legacy
5 References

Kabosu (circa November 2005 to May 24, 2024) was a female Shiba Inu who lived in Sakura, Chiba Prefecture, Japan, with her owner Atsuko Sato. Her photograph is the doge meme, which makes her the most financially consequential animal of the internet era: her face is the logo of Dogecoin, the visual ancestor of SHIB and the entire dog coin family, and the origin point of meme coin iconography.

Life

Kabosu was rescued in 2008 when a puppy mill shut down and its dogs faced culling; Sato adopted her and named her after the kabosu citrus fruit because of her round face. She lived as a family pet and therapy visit dog, appearing on Sato's blog from 2008 onward.

The doge meme

In February 2010 Sato posted a set of photos, one showing Kabosu side eyeing the camera with paws crossed on a sofa. The image spread through Reddit and Tumblr and by 2013 had become doge, the meme annotating the dog's inner monologue in multicolored Comic Sans. In December 2013 Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer adopted the image as the face of Dogecoin, and from there Kabosu's likeness propagated into thousands of tokens, including the entire Shiba Inu ecosystem launched by Ryoshi. The original photo was sold as an NFT for roughly 4 million dollars in June 2021, then a record for a meme NFT, and was later fractionalized into the DOG token by PleasrDAO.

Later years and death

In late 2022 Sato disclosed that Kabosu had chronic lymphoma and leukemia, and the dog's health updates were followed globally, with Dogecoin communities funding charity drives in her honor and a statue of her unveiled in a Sakura park in 2023. Kabosu died at home on the morning of May 24, 2024, at approximately 18, as Sato petted her. Coverage ran worldwide, from NPR to Deadline, and a farewell ceremony on May 26 drew more than 50 fans along with international media. Tributes came from across crypto, where her death was treated as the passing of the culture's founding figure.

Legacy

Kabosu outlived the joke, the bubble, and several of the coins that used her face. Her image remains the standard against which all meme coin mascots are measured, and her successors in the culture, including Balltze, are understood as descendants of the doge lineage. In the trenches her photo is shorthand for the entire premise of the asset class: a dog looked sideways at a camera, and a few hundred billion dollars of market history followed.

References

Category: People