Chloe Clem aka ‘side-eyeing Chloe’ to sell her popular meme as non-fungible token

A young girl who was immortalised as a meme in 2013 has tapped into her popularity further, by auctioning her viral meme, known as ‘side-eyeing Chloe’, as a non-fungible token (NFT). According to the BBC, NFTs are “unique digital tokens which are often attributed to art that has no physical representation.” The tokens provide a digital certificate of ownership for the art, but no copyright. This means that the auction winner will not possess the meme itself, but the digital token that represents the meme. As for the side-eying Chloe meme, the girl in the image, Chloe Clem, is set to auction the NFT of her iconic meme for roughly $15,000 worth of cryptocurrency. The funds will be used for the girl’s education, according to her mother. The viral image was taken in 2013, when Clem’s mother Katie posted a video in which she had filmed her two daughters while she was announcing a surprise trip to Disneyland. While Clem’s sister burst into happy tears, then two-year-old Clem had only disappointment to show on her face. The unimpressed look Clem directed towards her mother stood out for social media users, becoming a viral meme that is still popular today. Clem has remained a social media star with over 500,000 Instagram followers and has even been featured in a Google advertisement in Brazil. Cryptocurrencies are usually used for buying NFTs, and the transaction is recorded on blockchain, a publicly available ledger. Recently, several multi-million dollar NFT sales have been in the news. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey sold his first-ever tweet for about $2.9 million to a Malaysia-based businessman in March. In April this year, the woman who was featured in the ‘Disaster Girl’ sold it for $500,000. Another image known as the ‘Overly Attached Girlfriend Meme’ fetched a price of $411,000. However, NFTs have landed in controversy lately due to environmental concerns as vast amounts of energy are needed to process transactions, mine cryptocurrencies, and maintain the blockchain.