Dogecoin Cofounder Billy Markus Says 50% of Dogs He Sees in Japan Are Shiba Inu

Billy Markus Counts Shiba Inus on Japan's Streets

Billy Markus, the cofounder of Dogecoin (DOGE), spent Sunday, November 8 making an observation about the streets of Japan: in his experience, about half of the dogs he encounters there are Shiba Inus. Writing under his long-standing online alias Shibetoshi Nakamoto, he set the count out plainly: “like 50% of the dogs i see in japan are shiba inu,” he wrote, adding, “i love japan.” The remark went out as his November 8 post on X, and it drew attention from the crypto community within hours of publication. The count is anecdotal. Markus is describing what he has noticed in person, not quoting a registry or a survey, and he offers no method beyond the eyeball estimate. Even so, the observation carries weight coming from him, because the breed he describes is the one his own creation is built on. Shiba Inus have deep cultural roots in Japan and remain among the country's most recognizable native dog breeds, which makes the saturation he describes easy to believe even as a joke. Dogecoin takes its entire visual identity from the Shiba Inu, and the tie runs in the other direction as well: the breed gave its name to Shiba Inu (SHIB), the token that carried the Kabosu lineage into an ecosystem of its own within the wider family of dog-themed memecoin projects.

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His November 8 post on X.

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Kabosu and the 2010 Photo Behind Doge

The lineage behind the post runs older than the coin. Dogecoin (DOGE) launched on December 6, 2013, taking its look from the famous Doge meme: an image of a Shiba Inu with a quizzical expression, ringed by multi-colored Comic Sans text arranged as the dog's supposed thought bubbles. The format itself, a quizzical face framed by choppy, deliberately ungrammatical phrases in rainbow-colored Comic Sans, spread across the internet for years before anyone attached a cryptocurrency to it. The photograph at the center of that meme was taken in 2010, two years after its subject, a female Shiba Inu named Kabosu, had been adopted from an animal shelter by Atsuko Satō, a kindergarten teacher based in Sakura, east of Tokyo, who had rescued her in 2008 from a puppy mill where she would otherwise have been put down. Satō posted the picture of her pet crossing her paws on the sofa to her blog, from where it spread to Reddit and then outward, from college dorm rooms into office inboxes, until it became one of the internet's defining images. Markus and fellow software engineer Jackson Palmer turned that image into a cryptocurrency, started as a joke and released without an initial coin offering. Market data now ranks Dogecoin (DOGE) the 12th largest cryptocurrency, with a market capitalization of $11.17 billion, an outcome few would have projected from a single blog photo. Kabosu died in May 2024 after 14 years of internet fame, by which point her face had already set off a broader dog-themed token trend that produced several other projects, Shiba Inu among them. Markus's post therefore ties together three threads at once: the breed still walking Japanese streets, the coin it inspired in 2013, and the tokens that followed.

Two Tokens, One Photograph

Our reading is that the post is color, not signal: it carries no price view and no data on Dogecoin or Shiba Inu flows, and Markus frames it as a walk down a Japanese street, not an analysis. What it does show is how much identity two separate tokens still draw from a photograph taken in 2010. Our recent Shiba Inu coverage tracked the token's ordinary market mechanics: Shiba Inu's top-10 wallets slowed exchange deposits to 2.281 billion SHIB, Shiba Inu futures flow fell 67x to a net outflow of $207,230 over three days, and the token booked a 1.7% gain to $0.00000472 on a Bitcoin-led recovery, with our SHIB technical analysis tracking the support and resistance around those levels. Coverage has also followed community friction, including a Shibarium account muted for 118 days. Markus ended his post where it began, with a plain verdict: “i love japan.”