Kabosu, the Shiba Inu dog that inspired the original Doge meme, passed away in May—but her legacy lives on in the crypto world as the inspiration behind leading meme coin Dogecoin and a slew of spiritual successors. Now the owner of Kabosu has adopted a new dog, and the rush by crypto users to capitalize on the opportunity is causing a heap of drama.

On Saturday, the owner of Kabosu announced that she had adopted Neiro, a 10-year-old rescue Shiba Inu. Quickly, all hell broke loose on Crypto Twitter after multiple tokens created with the Neiro name. But which one is the real Neiro coin?

In reality, there is no official token. The owner of Neiro—who goes by "Kabosumama"—took to Twitter to state that she does not "endorse any crypto project except OwnTheDoge because they own the original Doge photo and IP.” OwnTheDoge is the project that fractionalized the original Doge photo and turned it into the coin DOG; it is not Dogecoin, which has no official link to Kabosu.

In spite of this lack of connection, a slew of Neiro tokens launched on Solana, with one hitting a $89 million market cap just three hours after the dog was first shared to the world via Twitter.

As this token was rising on Saturday, an undercurrent of Crypto Twitter users started sounding alarms that the token in question was not the real Neiro token. Instead, they believed another coin—of the same name and ticker—was the real token because it was launched an hour before the near-$90 million meme coin.

Notable pseudonymous crypto influencer and meme coin trader Ansem took to Twitter to explain that he assumed that the “new Doge” would be above a $100 million market cap, later linking to the token with the larger market cap. This was when the “first” Neiro coin sat just below $4.5 million, and the other token was at nearly $90 million.

Ansem then spoke on a Twitter Spaces hosted by the creators of the first Neiro coin, which some traders apparently took as an endorsement from the influencer. However, Ansem claimed that he hadn't bought into either token, explaining that he was going to sit out the chaos and invest once the market had picked a winner.

During the Twitter Spaces, however, market sentiment started to flip. The first Neiro coin soared to an almost $20 million market cap, while the nearly-$90 million token tanked to $23 million. 

It was neck and neck. A crypto civil war had erupted over the hot new dog coin.

Some Crypto Twitter denizens slammed Ansem, putting the blame on him for other traders rotating funds out of the larger meme coin and into the apparently earlier Neiro token.

“[Ansem] coping cuz he didnt get an entry into the real NEIRO,” one Twitter user said. “Ansem is an existential threat to Crypto Twitter,” another posted. Ansem was the target of increasingly sharp attacks, and later claimed that he had received death threats because of his involvement.

Over the next day, the two prominent Neiro tokens flipped each other multiple times. 

During this period, Ansem took the stance that the later token was the real Neiro in his view; at the time, it sat at a $62 million market cap, while the first Neiro was at $22 million. Over the next five hours, the Ansem-endorsed token dropped 58% and they swapped positions yet again.

It wasn’t only the two mentioned tokens that launched, however. Countless other Neiro coins launched, as well as a huge amount of Neiro spin-off tokens including Neiro Inu (NINU), Neiro Butt (NEIROBUTT) and Neiro Wif Glasses (NWG).

During the chaos, Solana meme coins inspired by Neiro collectively generated more trading volume on decentralized exchanges (DEXs) than the total trading volume on any individual Ethereum layer-2 scaling network, according to SolanaFloor. 

As the dust has settled, the Ansem-endorsed token sits at a $71 million market cap as of this writing, while the “first” Neiro coin has fallen to about $12 million. But Crypto Twitter continues to argue and fight over which Neiro is the real one. 

One party that ultimately benefits either way is Raydium, the Solana DEX that saw most of the weekend’s volume: It processed $2.5 billion in volume across Saturday and Sunday, with Sunday’s $1.37 billion tally being its best single day in July so far.

Edited by Andrew Hayward