If you ever followed an airdrop guide that I wrote in the past you probably needed Goreli ETH to complete the tasks. This testnet tokens is widely used because most Ethereum L2 chains use Goreli for testing purposes. It can only be obtained via faucets because all of the supply is already in circulation so people started selling it OTC.
This caused a ton of problems for people that needed more than 0.2 GETH per day so Layer Zero came up with a solution which solved the problem but also made a lot of GETH developers mad.
Should Testnet Tokens Have Value?
As soon as this bridge was created gETH could be valued in USD and this caused confusion and outrage all around the place. The initial conversion rate was roughly 1 ETH = 40K gETH but as the word started spreading speculators started speculating and gETH reached $2 per token before the Goreli devs stepped in to "fix the problem".
Mudit Gupta was the first one to unload his stack and ruin the fun for everyone but it didn't cause much damage. He ran out of test tokens fairly quickly.
The degens kept buying but then a whale emerged with 4.5M Goreli tokens to her name and the market is at a standstill ever since.
The debate over test tokens having value still isn't settled but the important thing here is that Layer Zero's plan worked. gETH is being distributed much quicker than what we had with faucets. A tiny piece of irony can be found here since the Devs that claim gETH should be free are also the largest sellers.
It is still insane that 1 gETH is worth $0.3 but I am one of the people that need it on a daily basis and would gladly pay this price for a few pieces just to bypass the faucets. As far as I am concerned, testnet tokens SHOULD have value because they can obviously be used to extract value.
Testnet airdrop hunting requires testnet tokens and if you end up getting an airdrop for early testing it was only because you had testnet tokens, is it not? And since the distribution of gETH is very bad right now this is a fair way to improve it IMO.
How Long Will The Meme Stay Alive?
I had a blast shitposting about geth these past few days but it became so much more than a meme very quickly. The trading volume on this thing is insane.
2-3M daily is a casual number now and if this keeps going it's only a matter of time before a CEX lists it just so they can capture the fees on the trading activity.
The devs are making it clear that Goreli has already served its purpose but speculators are still hungry and they don't care what the devs have to say.
The main driver of the gETH craze is the Coinbase L2 announcement. Their "Base" blockchain will be using Goreli ETH and everyone will need a ton of it. The network is set for retirement but that is still a long way down the road.
Make your own decisions if you decide to gamble with gETH, or just sit back and watch the drama unfold from the sidelines. Whatever happens Crypto has made history again because we already accomplished the impossible.
Monopoly money became real money in an instant and I just love to see it. You can literally earn fees by providing liquidity on Uniswap Goreli and dog coins are already being deployed. I sense a lot of fun ahead...