It’s a sad day for crypto bros and meme fans alike. The furry face that launched thousands upon thousands of memes, Kabosu – the Japanese shiba inu behind the viral ‘doge’ meme and £18bn Dogecoin cryptocurrency – has passed away at the grand old age of 18.

Arguably one of the most famous dogs in the world, Kabo-chan first entered the internet in 2010 when her owner, a Japanese kindergarten teacher, rescued her from a puppy mill and uploaded a photo onto her personal blog of Kabosu raising an eyebrow to camera. To her much amazement, the photo got picked up on a blog Your Daily Doge and then Tumblr page Shiba Confessions in 2012. Perhaps the most prolific format depicts Kabo-chan surrounded by fractured phrases written in rainbow Comic Sans, such as “wow”, “so” and “such” paired with nouns to reflect the dog’s internal monologue – a type of hyper-online lexicon that would later be dubbed as doge-speak.

But it wasn’t until 2013 that Kabosu’s likeness would enter the canon as the now-infamous cryptocurrency DogeCoin – first sold as an NFT for $4m (£3.1m) before launching as its own crypto, considered the world’s first meme coin. Now the eighth most valuable crypto with a market value of $23bn (wow, much prosper), perhaps it’s most famous backer is billionaire Elon Musk, who joked about the currency on X as “the people’s crypto”. Musk changed the Twitter icon (now, X) to Kabosu’s face last year, while a $100,000 statue of Kabosu and her sofa crowdfunded by Own The Doge, a crypto organisation dedicated to the meme, was unveiled in a park in Sakura in November last year.

Sato and Own The Doge have also donated massive sums to international charities, including more than $1m to Save the Children, which is “the single largest crypto contribution” it has ever received, according to the organisation. “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”.

“She quietly passed away as if asleep while I caressed her,” owner Atsuko Sato wrote on her blog. “I think Kabo-chan was the happiest dog in the world. And I was the happiest owner.”