Internet fame turned this little girl into a celebrity, and her newfound notoriety made her the subject of many social media posts and news stories. Then, she had her NFT created and began selling it at auction for thousands of dollars.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are digital tokens that are often ascribed to pieces of art that do not have a physical form.
Chloe Clem, now 10, made international headlines in 2013 after her mother posted her less-than-enthusiastic response to a surprise trip to Disneyland on the internet.
Concern over the image has emerged as a popular meme.
Ownership of a piece is registered as an NFT, but copyright of the work itself is not registered. Because the token is still owned by the winner of the auction, he does not really have the meme itself.
NFT: Numerical Function Identifiers are numerical function identifiers, and they may be quite valuable.
When it comes to the NFTs, people like to buy them in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which means the transaction is recorded on a public ledger known as blockchain.
There have been worries raised about the environmental impact of digital artworks because of the energy needed to mine and execute transactions as well as maintain the blockchain.
The video was first posted in September 2013 and features Chloe and her two younger sisters responding to the Disneyland announcement.
When the camera moved over to Chloe, who was using her trademark buck-toothed side-eye expression, Lily (one of the females) began sobbing and said that the Internet had triggered the chain reaction that followed.
More than 20 million people have seen the video of Chloe reacting to the internet phenomenon, while the picture of her response has been viewed more than 1 million times.
Her mother told the BBC that when she opened up Tumblr, “there was pages and pages of Chloe’s face.”
“It was strange and very stressful. Till this day, my relatives and friends send me memes about Chloe every time they see them on the internet.”
Chloe had quickly ascended to cult status on Tumblr due to a Buzzfeed piece on her just a few weeks later, when they referred to her as “the patron saint of Tumblr” and “the queen and goddess of the internet.”
A week after the family chose to sell the picture as an NFT, they opted to auction it off. Bids start at $5 worth of cryptocurrency called Ethereum, which is equivalent to approximately $15,000 USD.
According to Ms. Clem, after discovering the NFT market, it was obvious to sell the meme.
“This is a great chance for anybody who likes the Chloe meme to own it. It is, after all, normal for a 10-year-old to remark ‘that’s cool’.”
The market for rights to digital art has seen increased activity over the last several years, after the sale of many multi-million-dollar NFTs.
When Twitter creator Jack Dorsey sold his first ever tweet in March, it was purchased by a businessman in Malaysia for the equivalent of $2.9 million.
In April, the lady who became known as the “Disaster Girl” when she was seen in a hospital after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami raised $500,000 for charity. Following the success of the Overly Attached Girlfriend meme, another picture named the Overly Attached Girlfriend went for $411,000.