In Meme-oriam: Kabosu, Original Doge Who Inspired Dogecoin, Has Passed Away

By Stacy Elliott

The beloved Shiba Inu, Kabosu, who became a popular meme that eventually inspired the launch of Dogecoin in 2013, has passed away.

Her owner, 62-year-old kindergarten teacher Atsuko Sato, who lives in the city of Sakura in Chiba Prefecture, Japan, confirmed the news Friday in a blog post. She also wrote a poem about the dog's passing.

"At 7:50 a.m., I fell into a deep sleep," a translated copy of the poem says.

It was just this time last year that Own the Doge, a Doge-oriented NFT community backed by Doge DAO, a doge-focused decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), organized a trip for Kabosu fans to meet the pup that inspired so many memes.

The Doge DAO was born out of PleasrDAO, a collection of NFT artists and collectors who pool their funds to acquire culturally relevant digital art.

A few years later, Jackson Palmer launched Dogecoin in 2013. It was mostly a joke coin, although it was used to raise money for charities. But by early 2021, the r/WallStreetBets community on Reddit banded together to pump the price of Dogecoin. That May, Dogecoin skyrocketed to an all-time high of $0.7316.

At one point, investor Mark Cuban even predicted that Dogecoin would hit $1 and become a stablecoin.

It should come as no surprise that degens found a way to sell the news, no matter how somber. One trader who appears to have been accumulating billions of KABOSU meme coins sold their entire bag for $230 thousand after the death was confirmed.

At the time of writing, the DOGE price has slipped 5% compared to this time yesterday and is trading for $0.15. But it's not just Dogecoin (DOGE) that was inspired by Kabosu. DOGE gave rise to an entire category of dog-themed meme coins, like Shiba Inu, Floki Inu, and more recent upstarts like Dogwifhat.

The entire category appears to be mourning the loss of Kabosu. The entire dog-themed coins list on CoinGecko is down 5% compared to this time yesterday.

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