13/08/2021 People are buying $200,000 NFT rocks

Prices for NFTs have skyrocketed this summer, and crypto enthusiasts have invested exorbitant amounts of money in everything from digital trading cards to virtual property.

Now you can add digital rocks to the mix as well.

Prices doubled over the weekend and then again on Monday for EtherRocks, an early NFT project consisting of identical digital rocks that come in different colors, with some selling for more than 69 Ether, according to the Twitteraccount @EtherRockPrice, which tracks the rocks’ prices.

This means some rocks are selling for more than $200,000, and the price floor is more than $100,000 based on the price of Ether as of publication. Three days ago, the rocks were selling for around $50,000.

Although NFTs have been around for years, they exploded in popularity earlier this year during the pandemic and following the $69.3 million sale of an NFT collage at Christie’s by digital artist Beeple.

NFTs can be purchased on different third-party exchanges, one of the most popular of which is OpenSea.io. As for the EtherRocks, they can only be purchased on the project’s website.

The NFT rocks have been around since 2017, and were created around the same time as CryptoPunks, one of the earliest NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain.

On the EtherRocks website it states that the NFTs “serve NO PURPOSE beyond being able to be brought [sic] and sold, and giving you a strong sense of pride in being an owner of 1 of the only 100 rocks in the game :).”

Some of these 100 EtherRocks have been lost over time, according to CryptoBriefing, and the limited quantity has caused the price of the rocks to soar. Collectors are especially keen on rocks of different hues, including four rare bluish rocks, which contrast with the gray shades of most of the others.

One owner of a bluish NFT rock, who goes by @LilMoonLambo on Twitter, has listed it for 500 ETH, or more than $1 million. The rock has not yet sold.

They said they purchased the rock because in their opinion it is the second best historical NFT behind Larva Labs’ CryptoPunks.

“We live in the meme economy, and right now jpeg rocks are outperforming gold,” they told Fortune via Twitter DM. “Digital scarcity is the trend in a world of inflation.”

LilMoonLambo said the rocks have more value because of the scarcity compared with the CryptoPunks NFTs, of which there are thousands in existence.

“500 ETH is a drop in the bucket in the crypto art space,” they said.

Arts

https://fortune.com/2021/08/10/nft-rocks-200000/

Interesting NFTs
Okay Bulls #5487
Okay Bulls is a clean collection of 10,000 bulls building a bullish community that will transcend the internet into the real world.
taNNa
conceptual art. drawing and digitally processed.
#88320
By OthersideDeployer
Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?
"Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?" is dedicated to the mysterious creation of Bitcoin, and acts as the showcase artwork within Javier ArrĂ©s’ exploratory series "Bitcoin, The Origin". "Who is the creator of Bitcoin?" The artist, ArrĂ©s, explores this question, and the feelings of doubt and mystery that accompany it, through his unique artistic language. An unknown, an enigma. It should be remembered that the name Satoshi Nakamoto is a pseudonym of Bitcoin's author or authors and gives us little insight into its true creator. For this Visual Toy, ArrĂ©s uses the signature claw machine, his famous half-operation, to symbolize our collective ignorance and unconfirmed belief: As soon as it has the stuffed animal within its grasp and appears to have solved the puzzle, the animal escapes again, and again. At present, there are three more public and studied possibilities who are either believed to be the creators of the currency or who directly claim the creation of it. It may be all or none of them, yet these three personalities leave us clues which are an important part of this interesting enigma. For this moment, it will remain unknown... In this artwork, ArrĂ©s elevates the claw machine from the apparatus, to an iconic pop art object serving as an important element to the Bitcoin creation narrative. Action is everywhere, with each movement serving an iconographical or metaphorical purpose related directly to cryptocurrency: Various ups and downs, roller coasters, mining points, robot, coins and more speak to a sense of hope, risk, mystery, randomness and possibility of pay out. Hundreds of manically thought out details make this creation one of the artist’s most complex Visual Toys to date. ------- "Bitcoin, The Origin" is a set of two Visual Toys, titled "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto" and "It’s Alive!" which reflect and explore the mystery and enigmas behind the creation of Bitcoin. ArrĂ©s presents these proposals to us in his signature style, full of iconography, fantasy, maniacal animations and a panoply of details (both subtle and overt) which simultaneously fascinate, hypnotize, and narrate this historical milestone through the singular vision of the artist. Through this series, ArrĂ©s freezes a crucial moment of cryptocurrency history, taking a still photo under his vision and turning it into two unique crypto artworks. ---- More info about Javier ArrĂ©s: https://javierarres.com/about.html
The Scion
A young figure caught in a moment of distraction, aware only ephemerally of his unconscious being, as it engages in psychological and psychedelic layer spaces. His right arm casually cradles a moray eel; the figure is comfortable but not truly aware of the potentials for danger in such negligence. His shirt reads “Bello” in Pokemon style font, harkening back to a childhood straddling the millennial threshold. To his right side, out of the unconscious deep, shrouded alien heads propagate as a fractal totem, each new iteration a more sophisticated rendering of emotional masking over the cold mystery of the greys. As the scion of the Budgie-Sattva, the young man, in his distraction, is also simultaneously aware of higher levels of self discovery. To his left a psychological topology sets beneath the oracle side of an 8 ball ,hovering; its message a purest concept of acceptance. The “Scion” lettering is in 80’s HeMan style bold declaration. The lower right side of the painting is like a hybrid of melon, feathers, and seeds. The crystals in the background bring light; conducted, refracted, reflected, and dispersed, to balance the dark shadow of the figure’s physical body. The aura of the scion succeeds in layers to point, with a finger, and the crown chakra, toward a center of a mandala existing as nigh pure application of strokes, in essence painterly abstraction, but also revealing hints of the Aura of migraine, and the bi-hemispherical nature of the brain–noting concerns of the possibility of inherited mental disease. Yet the flourish of chakra as it sets against that center is robust, active, coherent, and reveling against all fear. Fundamentally, the piece speaks to the activation of one’s potential to begin to “Know Thyself”, and find greater awareness out of the enigmas of the mind–as an inculcated seed given to the rich soil of one’s own birthright.