She’s the dog whose face launched cryptocurrency Dogecoin. To shiba inu Kabosu’s fans she’s ‘Mona Lisa of the internet’
- Shiba inu Kabosu’s owner in Tokyo, Japan, adopted her in 2008, and two years later posted a fun picture of the dog on her blog. It led to a host of online memes
- The memes inspired the launch of Dogecoin, a joke cryptocurrency Elon Musk and others took seriously. Now there’s a Kabosu statue and the fun picture is an NFT
Her fluffy face now frail, Kabosu still flashes the enigmatic smile that made her the go-to meme dog for millennials and inspired a US$23 billion cryptocurrency beloved by Elon Musk.
She is best known as the logo of Dogecoin, but to Atsuko Sato, Kabosu is the elderly former rescue puppy who accompanies her every day to work at a kindergarten in Japan.
“It felt so strange” to discover her dog was an internet celebrity, Sato says in Sakura, where Tokyo’s eastern sprawl gives way to fields of rice and solar panels.
In 2010, two years after adopting the shiba inu, Sato posted a picture on her blog of Kabosu crossing her paws on the sofa and giving the camera a beguiling look.
That image became the “Doge” meme – and later an NFT digital artwork that sold for US$4 million.
“She is pulling a weird face,” Sato laughs. “Now I think she looks really nice” in the famous photo but “at first I thought it could be trashed”.
