Notorious Meme Disaster Girl Sold For $500,000

The well-known “Disaster Girl” meme goes to a new owner in its original form for around 500,000 US dollars. The photo of the maliciously smiling girl in front of a burning house has been circulating online for years and achieved cult status within a very short time.

The name Zoë Roth is unlikely to have been a household name until now. 17 years ago, the then four-year-old was photographed by her father in front of a burning house in Mebane, North Carolina. Fun for the whole neighborhood, as the fire was started by the local fire brigade for training purposes and was even allowed to be extinguished by onlookers. When Dave Roth won a photo competition with this picture in 2007, he could not have foreseen the rapid spread on the Internet – the “Disaster Girl” was born.

Crypto community pay 0.5 million dollars in Ethereum

Now the 21-year-old student is experiencing a rain of money after she flushed the original photo in the form of a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) with almost 500,000 US dollars. The family offered the picture as a virtual one-off in a resolution of 2560 x 1920 pixels on the Foundation auction platform, on which the hammer fell at a price of 180 ETH (Ethereum). The price of the cryptocurrency is now over 2700 US dollars per ether. According to the New York Times, Zoë Roth and her father will not lose their copyrights; they will even have a 10 percent share in future sales.

” People who appear in memes and go viral is one thing, but the way the internet stuck to my picture and kept it viral, kept it relevant, is so crazy to me. I’m super grateful for this whole experience. “, says Zoë Roth. She wants to donate her new fortune – which is still in crypto form – to charity and use it to pay off her student loan from the University of North Carolina, where she is studying “Peace, War, and Defense”.