IPv4 is, as it has increasingly been since January 2011 with the allocation exhaustion of IANA followed by the five RIRs: APNIC mid 2011, RIPENCC Mid East/Central Asia in 2012, LACNIC in 2014, ARIN in 2015, and now in RIPENCC Europe,
a speculative asset.
Note: with the notable exception, as lucy24 commented, of AfriNIC although it has given official notice of nearing exhaustion; albeit without timeline that I'm aware.
Note: remaining IPv4 is held for use within AfriNIC region...
Note: while other RIRs have procedures in place for transfers of allocated IPv4 AfriNIC does not; various proposals are being considered...
I guess few webdevs deal above the ISP/host level so this latest exhaustion appears to be surprising news. I hadn't really noticed either until a few years back when unsolicited domain name interest began to come with attached IPv4 address offers. Not that I have 'extra' of either... All that notice (8-years!) of opportunity knocking and I was oblivious. Dang nabbit.
<aside>
Much of the traffic, though disproportionately not revenue, for my French language sites is from (north and west) Francophone Africa: 21 countries, 300+ million people. Surprisingly, that region also has significant uptake of the Chinese language ones - must be quite a number of Chinese working on belt and road initiative projects there... now if only they'd spend their pay cheques on my affiliate links instead of home to family...
</aside>
