The identify Zoë Roth might not ring any bells. But probabilities are you’ve seen her picture.

One Saturday morning in 2005, when Ms. Roth was 4 years previous, her household went to glimpse at a house on fireplace in their community in Mebane, N.C. Firefighters had intentionally established the blaze as a managed fireplace, so it was a relaxed affair: Neighbors gathered and firefighters allowed little ones to consider turns keeping the hose.

Ms. Roth remembers observing the flames engulf the property when her father, an amateur photographer, questioned her to smile. With her hair askew and a figuring out glance in her eyes, Ms. Roth flashed a devilish smirk as the fire roared powering her. “Disaster Girl” was born.

In the years considering that Dave Roth, Zoë’s father, entered it in a image contest in 2007 and gained, the impression has been edited into various disasters from historical past, with Ms. Roth grinning impishly as a meteor wipes out the dinosaurs or the Titanic sinks in the distance. Now, right after much more than a ten years of getting her picture endlessly repurposed as a very important section of meme canon, Ms. Roth has bought the primary copy of her meme as a nonfungible token, or NFT, for nearly half a million bucks.

The meme sold for 180 Ether, a type of cryptocurrency, at a Basis auction on April 17 to a person discovered as @3FMusic. As with any currency, the benefit of Ether fluctuates, but as of Thursday, 180 Ether was valued at a lot more than $495,000. The Roths retained the copyright and will get 10 per cent of foreseeable future revenue.

The current market for possession rights to digital artwork, ephemera and media identified as NFTs, is exploding. All NFTs, which include the “Disaster Girl” meme Ms. Roth just sold, are stamped with a one of a kind little bit of electronic code that marks their authenticity, and saved on the blockchain, a distributed ledger method that underlies Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

In the meme hall of fame, “Disaster Girl” ranks alongside “Ermahgerd,” a pigtailed teenage lady posing with “Goosebumps” publications “Bad Luck Brian,” immortalized in a grimacing yearbook image with braces and “Success Child,” a toddler on a seaside with a clenched fist and an expression of extreme perseverance.

In an job interview, Ms. Roth mentioned providing the meme was a way for her to choose regulate above a predicament that she has felt powerless over due to the fact she was in elementary university.

In advance of producing the choice to provide, Ms. Roth consulted “Bad Luck Brian” himself — his serious identify is Kyle Craven — and Laney Griner, the mother of “Success Kid.”

“It’s the only thing that memes can do to acquire handle,” Ms. Roth recalled Mr. Craven telling her.

“Disaster Girl” memes have distribute far and vast. At the time, a team from Poland asked permission to use the meme for educational materials about a dying Indigenous language. Another person in Portugal despatched Ms. Roth photos of a mural with the meme.

“You just make it in good shape however you want to suit it,” she claimed. “I enjoy looking at them due to the fact I’d in no way make any of them myself, but I adore viewing how artistic people are.”

Over the years, she’s noticed hundreds of iterations of her picture. A person shared previous summer in the course of racial justice protests was among her favorites, she reported.

“Once it is out there, it is out there and there’s nothing at all you can do about it,” Mr. Roth stated. “It usually finds a way to continue to be appropriate with what ever new kind of terrible, terrible poor issue is occurring, so I have laughed at a lot of them.”

Ms. Roth, now 21, is a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researching peace, war and protection. She has by no means been acknowledged as “Disaster Girl” outright, she explained, but most of her mates and acquaintances know of her meme fame.

“People who are in memes and go viral is a single factor, but just the way the internet has held on to my image and saved it viral, retained it related, is so insane to me,” she said. “I’m super grateful for the entire practical experience.”

Even so, she claimed, she hopes to just one working day do a little something significant more than enough to change “Disaster Girl” to the second page of search effects for her identify.

Just after graduation, Ms. Roth options to consider a hole 12 months ahead of pursuing a graduate degree in international relations. She said she would donate the fortune she has produced from her likeness — which is continue to in cryptocurrency form — to charities and to pay off her scholar loans, between other points.

When she’s household, she usually walks past the large amount wherever it all begun and wonders if locals know that it is a “meme put,” she stated.

“People who are in memes didn’t seriously have a decision in it,” she mentioned. “The web is large. Irrespective of whether you’re acquiring a very good encounter or a lousy practical experience, you sort of just have to make the most of it.”

Ben Lashes, who manages the Roths and stars of other memes which include “Nyan Cat,” “Grumpy Cat,” “Keyboard Cat,” “Doge,” “Success Child,” “David Soon after Dentist” and the “Ridiculously Photogenic Guy,” reported his clientele experienced cumulatively created around $2 million in NFT profits.

He stated that NFT product sales had served build memes as a subtle art variety and “serious items of society.”

“I think anytime you can come across a collector — no make a difference what the cost is — who respects the artwork at the rear of it and is likely to cherish it, that is a thriving sale, regardless of whether it is a single Ether or 200 or 300,” he stated.