The protagonist of the meme known as Disaster Girl, the American Zoë Roth, in which she appears as a child smiling in front of a burning building, has sold her popular image in NFT format (it is a technology based on ‘blockchain’ that guarantees authenticity of a file in digital format as a work of art, as well as who is its owner) for 500,000 dollars (415,000 euros at the exchange).
Despite the bulk of the transaction, the authors of the photo (the family of the girl that appears in it) retain the rights to the work
Roth is currently 21 years old and became a well-known face on the internet when she was a child. In 2005, her father photographed her smiling in front of a burning building. Two years later, the photograph was uploaded to the internet, became popular and ended up becoming a meme under the title Disaster Girl, which featured photomontages of the smiling Zoe in front of different catastrophes for humorous purposes. .
This image has been sold as NFT for 180 units of the cryptocurrency Ether, which is equivalent to the current exchange rate of 415,000 euros, in an auction that took place on April 17, as reported by The New York Times (NYT).
The buyer of the Disaster Girl meme is 3F Music, a Dubai-based music studio, which has recently bought other NFTs like the psychopathic girlfriend meme (Overly Attached Girlfriend), for $ 411,000, or the NYT meta column on NFT, for $ 560,000.
Despite the sale, the Roth family retains the copyright to the work and will receive 10 percent of the proceeds from future sales.
Before the auction, Roth consulted with the lead of another meme, Kyle Craven, known on the Internet as Bad Luck Brian, who advised him to sell it, as well as other memes recently such as his and Nyan Cat (the latter, sold for 600,000 Dollars).
Recently, the NFT format has been used to sell a digital artwork by artist Beeple for 69 million euros, while the Japanese video game studio SEGA has announced that it will sell images and the soundtrack of its classic video games as works of art.
