In the world of non-fungible tokens, nothing is off the desk. After seeing individuals able to pour out ridiculous amounts of money to personal NFT’s of farts, cat footage, and Lindsay Lohan fanart, you is perhaps questioning what absurd shit will discover its means onto the blockchain subsequent. And apparently, the reply is clipart. Clipart of a rock. Clipart of a rock that anybody can obtain totally free right here, however that can be being bought on the blockchain for the value of a small house.

If studying that doesn’t make you need to stroll into the ocean, then excellent news: You, too, can personal one of many EtherRock up for sale proper now, for the low, low price of $272,679. And that value is simply going to maintain going up. When the nameless dev behind this undertaking first rolled out these collectibles in 2017, there have been solely 100 pet rocks put into circulation. As the positioning explaining the undertaking points out, this restricted run implies that “each new virgin rock gets more and more expensive.”

They additionally helpfully added that these digital rocks don’t serve a goal “beyond being able to be brought and sold, and giving you a strong sense of pride in being an owner of 1 of the only 100 rocks in the game.” So, yeah.

Apparently, that pitch was sufficient to carry crypto collectors on board. Two weeks in the past, the angel investor-turned crypto personality Gary Vaynerchuk tweeted about EtherRock as one of many “pre-2019 NFT projects” to control over the subsequent decade. Almost instantly, individuals started throwing down money, and their costs skyrocketed. Since Vaynerchuk’s tweet went out, transaction records present the value of a single pet rock going from 1.2 ETH (roughly $3,700 USD) to 32 ETH (roughly $99,200 USD) to 80 ETH (roughly $248,600 USD). Over the previous day, patrons have spent greater than $664,000 mixed on these collectibles, that, once more, are actually simply barely tinted variations of the same royalty-free clipart that anybody can obtain.

Different of us have completely different motivations for purchasing one in every of these rocky buddies. One purchaser defined in a Twitter thread that their $46,300 buy was a method to personal a little bit of NFT historical past.

“As we get into an age of digital collectibles, being one of the earliest forms of the art and the first do something gives them provenance that is valuable,” they wrote. “The pet rocks present the perfect shock value, it’s so stupid that it’s perfect. Fate loves irony.”

Another purchaser who dropped about $25,000 on his personal rock told Motherboard that these buys have been both “the stupidest or the most incredible decision of our lives.” He added that whereas he thought the idea was dumb at first, “FOMO kicked in,” the best way FOMO tends to do, and $25,000 later he had a tiny piece of NFT historical past of his very personal. And I completely get the sentiment—the web’s structure is doomed to rot from within as time goes on, leaving all of us with the job of archiving or buying bits of web historical past earlier than they’re gone for good. But when that piece of historical past is a few low-res clipart of a rock, you’re most likely higher off saving your cash and downloading that factor totally free.