Famous ‘Disaster Girl Turns Her Meme into Fortune with NFT

Disaster Girl – a picture of a young girl with a fiendish smirk on her face in front of a burning house – is one of the most popular and famous memes on the internet. The small girl, Zoe Roth, is grown up now, who is a senior at the University of North Carolina, perusing her undergraduate degree. 

Zoe Roth has sold her famous internet moment as a non-fungible token for 180 Ether which accounts for a staggering $473,000. Now, she has a good reason to smile.

How it began?

Zoe Roth was only four years old when her father snapped her picture in front of a house ablaze. Dave Roth was an amateur photographer who lives in Mebane, North Carolina. Nearby there was a fire station only two blocks away from their house.

On a lazy afternoon in January, 2005, Dave noticed a large smoke in his neighborhood and decided to take a stroll and check. The local fire station was running a regular drill. The fire was controlled. Dave Roth took an innocent photo of his little girl smiling with the burning house in the background. Dave was a photographer, and he regularly uploaded his pictures on photo-sharing sites and engaged in competitions.

However, fame didn’t come instantly. Dave first uploaded the picture at Zooomr with the title “firestarter” on 2007. It didn’t receive much attention. He submitted the picture to JPG magazine for a competition called “emotion capture”. JPG magazine selected the image for publication in 2008. The same year, the magazine uploaded the picture on their site; the picture was well received. Later, it was shared on many platforms.

Since then, the picture became one of the most popular meme material on the internet. It had every character of a worthy meme – a girl with a devilish smile, a burning house in the background. It was translated as a mischievous girl who deliberately set her house on fire. The netizens quickly picked it up, and it was shared millions of times ever since. Decades later, it is still being used.

Route to NFT:

Though the picture brought fame to Zoe Roth, she didn’t have the means to monetize it, until now. Who could have thought that years later the tech world would evolve so much, where people will be selling digital arts and collectibles for millions of dollars?

Fast-forward 15 years, the internet is submerged with the latest trend of non-fungible tokens. With the blessing of technology, decades-old meme Nyan Cat is being sold for $600 grand. Digital art is being sold for almost as much as $70 million. The trend has stormed the internet, and everyone is joining it.

At the height of demand, Zoe Roth received e-mails suggesting that she should try to sell her image as an NFT with a massive potential profit.

What is a Non-Fungible Token?

Non-fungible tokens are a form of digital art that is backed by blockchain technology. NFTs are a special kind of unique crypto assets on the blockchain that is guaranteed non-interchangeable with one another for equal value. NFTs are different from cryptocurrency as they offer unique value.

A non-fungible token can be anything – a video game, a video clip, a work of art, a collectible card or image, a gif, special moment, and audio file, or any other unique object - which is stored and managed on a blockchain.

The auction:

Zoe Roth was skeptical at first, but after researching the topic, she too interest. She consulted with other meme figures such as “Bad Luck Brian” (Kyle Craven) and “Overly attached girlfriend” (Liana Morris), who were also joining the train too. She and her father also consulted a lawyer and hired a manager to get things done properly. On 16 April, the meme “Disaster Girl” was listed as an NFT for a 24-hour auction. The procedure was well consulted. She managed to “mint” the digital art, for which she will be receiving a 10% cut from future sales. This is how she secured true ownership of her famous moment. To sell the NFT, they needed to get an invitation from a hosting website; they got it from the creator of Nyan Cat, and they were ready.

The auction took an incredible jump in the final moment. The highest bid was still $25,000 when there were only a few minutes left. With a new bid every minute, the price of the NFT kept rising, ultimately skyrocketed to $473,000. Roth had expected to sell her NFT at 100 Ether. Eventually, it was acquired by 3FMusic, who bid 180 Ether, way more than what Roth had expected.

“Being able to sell it just shows us that we do have some sort of control, some sort of agency in the whole process,” said Roth in her reaction to the newspaper. Zoe Roth said she will spend a part of the money to pay her college debt and share a part with her family.

The Trend:

The event, however, didn’t occur out of blue. Other popular memes had already started being sold. The “Overly Attached Girlfriend” was sold for $524,000 and the “Bad Luck Brain” was sold for $36000 earlier. However, it started way ago when a decade-old meme “Nyan Cat” was sold for $600,000.

It depicts the incredible power of the internet and modern technology. We all have lived these popular memes, and, at that time, we couldn’t imagine that one day these well-known portraits will be sold for hefty amounts. Such is the evolution of technology.

The non-fungible token trend is sweeping the internet this year. Everyone seems to join the trend. We don’t know how this will take shape in the future. Is it a short-term bubble that will burst in the future, or is it something that will redefine the future? We will have to wait for it.

For now, it is being worshipped. Just a month ago, a Beeple’s art, Everyday – the first 5000 days- was sold for a whopping $69 million. A pipe-smoking crypto punk character was sold for $7.5 million. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey sold his first-ever tweet as NFT for $2.9 million.