You probably won’t believe it, but on Thursday a CryptoPunk was indirectly bought for 527,281 goerli ether. The buyer changed his gurli ether in order for real ether to finance the purchase. For those 500,000+ testnet tokens, which were once worthless, he got 72.72 ether, which is worth more than $100,000.
What is Goerli Ethereum?
Goerli is a test network for Ethereum. Basically, this is a network where developers can test new applications for software coming soon to Ethereum. For example, in the run-up to The Merge, Goerli was used to test the software before the main network made the switch.
In that regard, the tokens on Goerli shouldn’t represent any monetary value at all, but they currently do. For developers, this means that they can no longer use Goerli to test new applications.
At the time of writing, you can pay as much as $0.23 for one goerli ether, but the test network’s tokens traded at their peak at $1.69 each. In this way, we have now succeeded in exchanging goerli ethers for an extremely valuable NFT on the main network of Ethereum.
Shortage of gurli ether
Normally you can get gurli ether for free from a so called faucet. These are websites where you can enter your address and get some free tokens sent to them. However, a shortage of gurli ether in the faucets suddenly meant that the coins acquired a monetary value.
So far it has not lost that monetary value and so someone has even managed to buy a very expensive NFT with it. You could just sit on a mountain of those testnet tokens and suddenly be able to sell them for gigantic sums.
What people intend to do with it is not all that clear, but it will mainly be speculation. That does not alter the fact that a lot of people have now managed to earn decent money with the testnet coins of the Goerli blockchain.