NFT Of the original World Wide Web Source Code Sold For $5.4million at Sotheby’s auction house.
World-wide-web inventor Tim Berners Lee sold the source code as an NFT to an undefined buyer through auction house Sotheby’s. The NFT was titled “This changed Everything”. NFTs record the ownership of digital items. It contains time-stamped files containing 9,555 lines of the source code. It also includes animated visualization of code, a digital poster and a letter written by Berners lee.
The letter begins: “As People seemed to appreciate autographed versions of books, now we have NFT technology, I thought it could be fun to make an autographed copy of the original code of the first web browser.”
The auction at Sotheby’s was between June 23 to June 30. According to the auction house, the bid’s starting price was $1000. The NFT of the world wide web was created by British computer scientist Tim Berners Lee in 2021. It represents ownership of digital items from when he invented WWW.
Cassandra Hatton, global head of science and popular culture at Sotheby’s, stated, “We have placed it in a public forum, we have sold it at basically no reserve and we let the market decide what value is going to be. There have been multiple bidders who have all agreed that it’s valuable.”
An Error In The NFT Video of world wide web
Mikko Hypponen, from security company F Secure, spotted an error in the NFT video sold for $5.4 million. The researcher said it looked like “a simple mistake.” He explained certain symbols translated into HyperText Markup Language, believing it was an error.
“There have already been discussions about whether this would make NFT more valuable-like a postage stamp with misprint error,” Hypponen said.
This one is the latest series that traditional auction houses move to embrace blockchain-based assets that exploded in popularity in early 2021. Recently, Twitter also joined the NFT trend. It started giving away 140 Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) for free to followers as per their series of tweets.