During a conversation with friends in a bar in Los Gatos, California, Gary Dahl had the idea of making fun of the attention paid to pets. He thus invented the "domestic rocks", better known as Pet Rock: gray pebbles, coming from the Mexican beach of Rosarito Beach, packaged and sold in a cardboard box with holes for ventilation - as if they were real pets. The Pet Rock was accompanied by a humorous instruction booklet, full of double meanings and jokes on how to properly care for your "house stone". In a few months, especially during Christmas '75, about a million Pet Rocks were sold for $ 4 each: Gary Dahl became a millionaire and the Pet Rocks a cult object.
An original package of the Pet Rock. Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain In June 2017, a similar idea was transposed digitally: the EtherRocks are one of the first collections of NFT, issued on the Ethereum blockchain shortly after the launch of the CryptoPunk (among other things, a mysterious buyer of the is stocking up). Each EtherRock shows a still image of a stone, different only in color gradation. Only one hundred EtherRocks were minted, implemented with smart contracts in December 2017. According to Etherscan, the first EtherRock was sold on December 26, 2017 for 0.099 Ethereum (about $ 300 at the time). According to Etherscan, only three rocks were sold between 2017 and 2020 with prices between 0.1 and 0.36 Ethereum.
The recent euphoria for NFTs has however led to a gradual and steady increase in sales: during the first half of 2021 the majority of EtherRocks were sold, with a directly proportional increase in prices. The EtherRocks are currently sold out and one of the latest has been purchased for 78 Ethereum (more than $ 250,000).
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