Sakura, Japan:

Her fluffy face now frail, Kabosu still flashes the enigmatic smile that made her the go-to meme dog for millennials and inspired a $23 billion cryptocurrency beloved by Elon Musk.

She’s 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.

“It felt so strange” to discover her dog was an internet celebrity, Sato told AFP 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 $4 million.

“She’s pulling a weird face,” Sato laughed. “Now I think she looks really nice” in the famous photo but “at first I thought it could be trashed”.

The meme grew from an online forum post into an anarchic in-joke that bounced from college bedrooms to office emails.

“One of my friends messaged me: ‘Isn’t this picture Kabosu?’ Then I searched for it and found all sorts of memes, like Kabosu turning into a doughnut,” Sato said.

The 62-year-old is now so used to “unbelievable” events that when Tesla boss Musk changed the icon for Twitter, now X, to Kabosu’s face last year, she “wasn’t even that surprised”.

“In the last few years I’ve been able to connect the online version of Kabosu, all these unexpected things seen from a distance, with our real lives.”

‘Mona Lisa of the internet’

Kabosu spends most days resting in a cart at the kindergarten or on a big cushion at home, where fan-made Doge tributes adorn the walls.

The memes typically use goofy broken English to reveal the inner thoughts of Kabosu and other shiba inu “doge” — usually pronounced like pizza “dough” but with a “j” at the end.

“Very love. Such star OMG. So heart. Much drawing,” says one framed print using this signature “doge speak”.

Kabosu fell ill with leukaemia and liver disease at the end of 2022, and Sato is sure the “invisible power” of prayers from fans worldwide helped her pull through.

Then in November last year, 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.

Sato and Own The Doge have also donated large sums to international charities, including more than $1 million to Save the Children. The NGO says it is “the single largest crypto contribution” it has ever received.

“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”.

‘People’s crypto’

Dogecoin was started as a joke by two software engineers and is now the world’s eighth most valuable cryptocurrency with a market cap of $23 billion.

“The Doge meme was pretty big on the internet in 2013 and I spent a lot of time on Reddit and other forums back then,” Dogecoin co-founder Billy Markus told AFP.

Markus, who is no longer affiliated with Dogecoin, was amused by the “silliness and innocence” of the memes.

Fellow founder Jackson Palmer “drank a beer and saw the doge meme and Bitcoin in the news and thought saying he was gonna invest in Dogecoin would make a funny tweet”, he said.

Markus found the idea “hilarious” and created the coin in “a few hours” before contacting Palmer and taking it live.

“Lots of weird stuff happened after that,” he said.

Since then, Dogecoin has been backed by stoner hip-hop king Snoop Dogg, “Shark Tank” entrepreneur Mark Cuban and Kiss bassist Gene Simmons, who once tweeted: “I bought Dogecoin… six figures.”

But its most keen supporter is probably the billionaire Musk, who jokes about the currency on X — sending its value soaring — and hails it as “the people’s crypto”.

Dogecoin has also inspired a plethora of other cheap and highly volatile “memecoins”, including spin-off Shiba Inu and others based on dogs, cats or Donald Trump.

– ‘Legend lives on’ –

A solitary figure wearing a Doge mask looks out over the Los Angeles skyline — this is Tridog, who says he has “worked for a dog photograph for almost three years”.

Own The Doge is his full-time job, and he preaches their motto D.O.G.E, or “Do Only Good Every Day”.

In 2021, Sato sold the viral photo of Kabosu as a non-fungible token (NFT), a digital ownership certificate that can be traded online, to a group of crypto art collectors called PleasrDAO for $4.2 million.

That makes it “a top-five most expensive photo ever sold”, Tridog told AFP.

PleasrDAO split the NFT’s value into a brand-new memecoin called $DOG, allowing many people to collectively “own” the meme.

Own The Doge has brought fans and other meme stars to Japan to meet Kabosu and Sato, and it recently secured the intellectual property rights to the famous photo, paving the way to make Doge toys, films and other products.

As a rescue dog, Kabosu’s real birthday is unknown, but Sato estimates her age at 18 — past the average lifespan for a shiba inu.

When Kabosu dies, “the world will mourn”, Tridog said, but “a legend always lives on”.

He hopes people will remember “the deeper values” behind the Doge meme: “the wholesomeness, the silliness, the not taking yourself too seriously.”

 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

An outright ban on crypto currencies that was mooted by the Reserve Bank of India, and under consideration by the government, is likely off the cards. File.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

With the G-20 countries agreeing to explore a coordinated regulatory framework for crypto assets, India could wait a while longer before firming up its domestic regulations for crypto currencies, and initiate a dialogue with stakeholders on the way forward.

An outright ban on crypto currencies that was mooted by the Reserve Bank of India, and under consideration by the government, is likely off the cards, a senior government official indicated on Sunday.

“Earlier, India was contemplating a ban on it. A lot of conversation happened. In late 2021, there was a lot of interest in crypto currencies, a lot of people were buying it and even advertisements were coming in IPL matches, which we felt was not on,” the official recalled.

Also read: Explained | What is the crypto awareness campaign?

“When we went deeper into regulating it, we realised one country alone cannot do it. Unless we get into monitoring and controlling every device on the Internet, which is not the kind of regulation we want in India. So whatever we do, all along this thought has been there to build a global consensus,” the official explained.

The G-20 leaders’ declaration has endorsed the Financial Stability Board (FSB) recommendations to regulate and supervise crypto-assets’ activities. It welcomed a synthesis paper from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the FSB, which includes a roadmap for a coordinated regulatory framework that factors in risks, including those specific to emerging markets, and pertaining to money laundering and terror financing.

The G-20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors will discuss taking forward this road map at a meeting in Marrakesh next month.

‘Timely implementation is key’

“The purpose is that the risks are well-managed. Any country can allow higher risks if they want, or ban it if they like, but whatever one does, it should not go below a certain level of regulation otherwise It will lead to shifting of the trade to other jurisdictions,” the official pointed out, explaining the G-20 push for timely implementation of FSB recommendations in a consistent manner globally to avoid regulatory arbitrage.

“Each of the recommendations of the paper has to be assimilated, we have to think through what it means vis-à-vis our economy and financial system. It has to be taken up not just by the G-20 countries, but others as well. If one country says we will have a very relaxed approach towards it, it will defeat the entire purpose,” he said.

“Based on this, we need to have a conversation based on our system with our stakeholders on how we see the policy recommendations, the roadmap and what is our final view,” he underlined.

IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva said on Sunday that “more work lies ahead” in the realm of digital money and crypto assets. “To this end, the G-20 has tasked relevant institutions to improve regulation and supervision of crypto assets — the IMF is contributing to proposals for a comprehensive policy framework; and advance the debate on how central bank digital currencies could impact the global economy and financial system,” she said.

FILE PHOTO: Celsius Network logo and representations of cryptocurrencies are seen in this illustration
| Photo Credit: REUTERS

Cryptocurrency lender Celsius Network said Bitcoin mining is key to the company’s restructuring efforts at a U.S. bankruptcy court hearing on Monday in Manhattan.

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New Jersey-based Celsius received approval from U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Martin Glenn to spend $3.7 million in construction costs at a new Bitcoin mining facility and $1.5 million on customs and duties on imported Bitcoin mining rigs. Patrick Nash, a lawyer for Celsius, told Glenn that Bitcoin mining could provide a way for the company, which halted other business operations like its cryptocurrency lending, to repay customers, whose assets its froze in the weeks leading up to its bankruptcy filing.

“In a world where the crypto market rebounds, the mining business has the potential to be quite valuable,” Nash said.

Celsius filed for Chapter 11 protection on July 13, listing a $1.19 billion deficit on its balance sheet. Crypto lenders’ business model came under scrutiny following a sharp crypto market sell-off spurred by the collapse of major tokens TerraUSD [UST] and LUNA in May.

Celsius’ assets shrank amid the extreme volatility, and its freezing of customer accounts was an attempt to stem losses and stabilise its business, Nash said.

Celsius hopes the mining effort will help it repair its relationship with customers, some of whom sent threats and hate mail to some company employees in the weeks before the Chapter 11 filing.

But a group of equity investors previewed a possible fight for control over the Bitcoin mining operations. Dennis Dunne, the investors’ lawyer, said they may argue that the newly mined coins should be considered property of the UK subsidiary that raised the funds for the mining operation, rather than being distributed for the benefit of all Celsius creditors.

Customers might also object to Celsius’ spending on Bitcoin mining vendors at a time when their own recovery is in doubt, the U.S. Department of Justice’s bankruptcy watchdog said.