The Japanese shiba inu inspired a generation of online jokes and became the face of Dogecoin cryptocurrency.
She had been suffering from leukaemia and liver disease and died on 24 May.
"She quietly passed away as if asleep while I caressed her," Atsuko Sato wrote on her blog, thanking Kabosu's fans.
"I think Kabo-chan was the happiest dog in the world. And I was the happiest owner."
As a rescue dog, Kabosu's real birthday was unknown, but Ms Sato estimated her age at 18.
In 2010, two years after adopting Kabosu from a puppy mill where she would otherwise have been put down, Ms Sato, a teacher from Sakura, east of Tokyo, took a picture of her pet crossing her paws on the sofa.
She posted the image on her blog, from where it spread to online forum Reddit and became a meme that bounced from college bedrooms to office email chains.
The memes typically used goofy broken English to reveal the inner thoughts of Kabosu and other shiba inu "doge" - pronounced like pizza "dough" but with a "j" at the end.
The picture also later became an NFT digital artwork that sold for $4m (£3.1m) and inspired Dogecoin, which was started as a joke by two software engineers and is now the eighth-most valuable cryptocurrency, with a market capitalisation of $23bn.
Dogecoin has been backed by hip-hop star Snoop Dogg and Kiss bassist Gene Simmons.
But its most keen supporter is billionaire Elon Musk, who jokes about the currency on X - sending its value soaring - and hails it as "the people's crypto".
Kabosu fell ill with leukaemia and liver disease in late 2022, and Ms Sato said in a recent interview with AFP that the "invisible power" of prayers from fans worldwide helped her pull through.
An X post by Dogecoin Friday called Kabosu the community’s “inspiration.” “The impact this one dog has made across the world is immeasurable,” the post read.
Sato said in a series of Instagram posts in 2022 that Kabosu had leukemia and liver disease. She is planning to hold a “farewell gathering” on Sunday.
Kabosu, the dog that launched a thousand “doge” memes, has died, her owner announced Friday.
The Japanese shiba inu “fell into a deep sleep” on Friday morning at 18 years of age, Atsuko Sato wrote in a blogpost.
“Outside the window, birds were singing on a beautiful morning. As I was touching her, she gently passed away,” wrote Sato, a kindergarten teacher in the Japanese city of Sakura. “I think she was the happiest dog in the world.”
Kabosu became one of the most recognizable animals on the internet back in 2010 when a photo of her posing with folded paws and a quizzical expression spread across forums such as Reddit.
That sparked a proliferation of “doge” memes, based on an intentional misspelling of the word “dog,” with internet users photoshopping Kabosu’s face onto pastries, landmarks and other animals.
The popularity of “doge” memes was cemented in December 2013, when Kabosu became the face of alternative cryptocurrency Dogecoin — a tongue-in-cheek response to Bitcoin that reflected the internet’s love of animal memes. Other meme tokens followed, including a shiba inu coin.
Dogecoin counts Elon Musk among its fans. In May 2021, he polled his millions of followers on Twitter on whether Tesla should accept the cryptocurrency as payment.
A month earlier, when cryptocurrencies were seeing a surge in popularity, demand for Dogecoin spiked so much that it briefly broke the cryptocurrency trading system of Robinhood, a stock trading and investing platform.
An X post by Dogecoin Friday called Kabosu the community’s “inspiration.” “The impact this one dog has made across the world is immeasurable,” the post read.
Sato said in a series of Instagram posts in 2022 that Kabosu had leukemia and liver disease. She is planning to hold a “farewell gathering” on Sunday.
