Free Clipart of a Cartoon Rock Is Selling For $300,000 As NFTs

EtherRock, an early NFT project consisting of 100 discrete images of the same cartoon rock, each tinted a slightly different color, is seeing the price of its NFTs soar after crypto-savvy media personality Gary Vaynerchuk tweeted about them a couple of weeks ago. According to Motherboard, "the lowest listed price for a single EtherRock is now 95.2 ETH, or about $300,000. And of the 761 total EtherRock transactions, 581 have happened within the last two weeks. The current highest price paid for an EtherRock is 96 ETH." From the report: The anonymous developer behind EtherRock is still actively maintaining the project. "I was a complete amateur when I built it," they said in an interview with Motherboard. "It was originally intended as a) a joke and b) an exercise for me to learn [the Ethereum coding language] Solidity." They said they would've "spent a lot more effort" on the NFTs had they known they were going to get this expensive. You could be forgiven for thinking it's "stupid" to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on tokens tied to royalty-free clip art, but EtherRock owners figure they'll get the last laugh. Prominent token-holders include Bitcoin advocate Meltem Demirors and former BitMEX executive Arthur Hayes (the latter of whom is still facing federal prosecution for allegedly violating the Bank Secrecy Act). "Rocks are about flexing," she said. "There are only 100 rocks, and people who try to pretend they own one get called out quickly. Because the data is all public domain, you can see when a rock is moved to a new wallet address."

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