Shiba Inu dog, that inspired "Doge" meme and Dogecoin, turns 16

Kabosu is a rescue Shiba Inu living in Japan. (Image credit: Photo Instagrammed by kabosumama)

Kabosu, the rescue Shiba Inu dog in Japan that inspired the iconic “Doge” meme, turned 16 this week. The meme, widely shared on the internet, inspired the Dogecoin cryptocurrency.

Kabosu gained the internet fame over a decade ago, when her owner, Atsuko Sato, a Japanese kindergarten teacher, posted pictures of her online in 2010. By October of the same year, a Reddit user coined the word “Doge” by captioning one of the photos of Kabosu. “LMBO LOOK @ THIS F****N DOGE,” the user wrote.

On Wednesday, Kabosu’s owner posted photos of her wearing a party cap, with the wall behind her having “Happy Birthday” paper cuttings. "Today is Kabosu's birthday. She is 16 years old,” she wrote on Instagram.

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A post shared by かぼすママ (@kabosumama)

The online popularity of the “Doge” rose to dizzying heights, becoming a viral meme that ended up on t-shirts, mugs, easter eggs and even on a racing car. The meme eventually inspired a cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrency Dogecoin, pronounced dohj-coin, was created in 2014 by two software engineers.

In 2013, Jackson Palmer, then an employee at Adobe, made a satirical tweet about investing in “Dogecoin”, his joke cryptocurrency. He did not actually think people would do it. Palmer had tied up with Billy Markus, an IBM developer, to create the cryptocurrency.

What started as a ‘joke’ became a phenomenon in the digital cryptocurrency space. By 2014, it became the fifth largest cryptocurrency in the world and it even spawned convention for its fans in San Francisco creatively titled “Dogecoin.”

In June this year, the Doge meme was sold as a non-fungible token (NFT) for $4 million after the dog’s owner put up the image for auction. I became the most expensive meme NFT ever sold.