The latest craze to resurface in the effervescent nonfungible token (NFT) scene is a drove of digital pet rocks from 2022 dubbed EtherRocks.

On Lord's day, a single EtherRock sold for a whopping 45 Ether (ETH) — worth roughly $135,240 at the fourth dimension.

EtherRock was 1 of the first crypto collectible NFTs issued on the Ethereum blockchain, following shortly later on CryptoPunks' June 2022 launch. Every EtherRock showcases a still image of a stone, with each token donning a unique colour but being identical in shape and size.

Only 100 EtherRocks will ever exist minted, with the project's smart contracts having been deployed on December. 25, 2022. According to Etherscan, the first EtherRock appears to have been sold on December. 26, 2022, for 0.099 ETH (worth roughly $300 at the time).

Etherscan shows that only about twenty more rocks were sold in the kickoff three years of the game'due south existence, fetching prices between 0.1 and 0.36 ETH. After ho-hum but steady sales during the first half of 2022, the recently bubbling NFT marketplace has inspired investors to rush the remaining EtherRock supply — causing prices to surge.

With each of the 100 EtherRocks having sold off, many of the tokens have been put up for resale on popular NFT marketplaces. Secondary prices range from 31 ETH ($96,100) upwards to a staggering 626,262 ETH (roughly $one.9 billion).

Physical pet rocks were first launched back in 1975 as a collectible toy past advertising executive Gary Dahl.

Related: Tales from 2050: A look into a world built on NFTs

Offering tongue-in-cheek comment on the surging popularity of the tokenized pet rocks, Ran Neuner, co-founder and CEO of Onchain Capital, tweeted on Tuesday that the NFTs are the ultimate shop of value and aggrandizement hedge:

"There are 7bn people in the earth, 21m Bitcoin — Just only 100 Rocks in the world. Can you imagine what happens when institutional money starts flowing into rocks? It's a matter of fourth dimension until a Rocks ETF is approved."

CryptoPunks accept been ane of the biggest successes in the world of NFT collecting, with the tokens regularly fetching six-figure prices. Every bit reported by Cointelegraph on Wednesday, a crafty collector recently made $80,000 profit in a CryptoPunk resale afterwards purchasing the token for most zip.