Everyone grows up on the internet these days and Zoe Roth is no exception.
Known as "Disaster Girl", she became "famous" for a meme that made the round years ago when she was just 4 years old in front of a burning home, smiling as if she somehow caused this disaster.
Now, at the age of 21, she has made $500,000 from the NFT sale of that very meme and is living a pretty normal life. She is a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill studying peace, war and defense. She has never been recognized as “Disaster Girl” outright, she said, but most of her friends and acquaintances know of her meme fame.
In a New York Times article, they said:
In the years since Dave Roth, Zoë’s father, entered it in a photo contest in 2007 and won, the image has been edited into various disasters from history, with Ms. Roth grinning impishly as a meteor wipes out the dinosaurs or the Titanic sinks in the distance. Now, after more than a decade of having her image endlessly repurposed as a vital part of meme canon, Ms. Roth has sold the original copy of her meme as anonfungible token, or NFT, for nearly half a million dollars.
The meme sold for 180 Ether, a form of cryptocurrency, at an auction on April 17 to a user identified as @3FMusic. As with any currency, the value of Ether fluctuates, but as of Thursday, 180 Ether was valued at more than $495,000. The Roths retained the copyright and will receive 10 percent of future sales.
The market for ownership rights to digital art, ephemera and media known as NFTs, is exploding. All NFTs, including the “Disaster Girl” meme Ms. Roth just sold, are stamped with a unique bit of digital code that marks their authenticity, and stored on the blockchain, a distributed ledger system that underlies Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
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