Puppy at center of wild NYC dog mayor election ‘rigged’ by crypto bros suddenly dies

Now he’s fetching crypto sales from the great doghouse in the sky.

An adorable puppy influencer that prompted a bizarre cryptocurrency-fueled rigged New York City dog mayor election died suddenly in his sleep “without clear explanation,” his heartbroken owner said Wednesday.

“He was an absolute hero of happiness,” Kathy Grayson wrote in an Instagram tribute to her Pomeranian, Bertie,  who died Tuesday. “[He was] the love of my life, who was my best friend every day, every hour for over eleven years.”

Bertie — an 11-year-old Paddington Bear look-alike with nearly 400,000 Instagram followers — became the subject of a hair-raising scandal earlier this month when cryptocurrency fanatics hijacked a fun competition for “Honorary NYC Dog Mayor.”

A mystery tech geek first launched a crypto coin, named BERT after the dog, and began pushing the pooch’s candidacy on social media in an effort to drum up the value of the currency, according to participants and organizers.

The “pump the price” scheme — which allegedly included offers to pay for votes — unleashed a flood of electronic ballot stuffing and a suspicious spike in votes for Bertie.

Dog owners quickly began to howl.

One participant, Olivia Caputo, even yanked her lovable Shih Tzu, Enzo, from the competition after it amounted to “election fraud” and became too negative, she told The Post.

Stephen Calabria, who started the contest in 2022,  admitted that he noticed some bone-ified suspicious activity during the pup race.

“There were certain things that just didn’t seem right. Like blocs of 2,000 votes at once. It went from neck-and-neck to [Bertie] winning by 96 percent or something,” Calabria told the New York Times. “If I never hear the word crypto again, it will be a blessing.

A message circulating online also urged people to get an Instagram account to vote for Bertie —  declaring, “Post a few pictures. You know what I mean. Basically, don’t look like a bot.”

Grayson, an art gallery owner, insists she had “nothing to do with”  the crypto weirdness  — and  ultimately conceded the victory to a sweet-faced basset hound-mix named Simon.

Bertie, who was adopted from a shelter in Oklahoma, was instead named deputy dog mayor of the Big Apple.

“The whole thing has been in a way, darkly hilarious,” Grayson told The Times. “It has absorbed the anxiety facing people in human elections. People are getting worked up projecting all the human stuff.”

Grayson posted a heartfelt tribute to her loyal four-legged friend on Wednesday — saying he helped her through some very, well, ruff patches in life.

“We were inseparable,” she wrote. “I told him every day how much I loved him and how much he meant to me; he showed me every day how much he loved me back.

“Bert got me through my fiance Errol dying in 2016, my father dying a few months later, my mother dying two years later,” she said. “I wish I had more time with him, he was a priceless and unique individual. He had true star power.”

On Thursday, the value of the BERT cryptocurrency had plunged dramatically after peaking at an all-time high on Nov. 15.