On June 15 in London, the source code of the World Wide Web that was developed by Tim Berners-Lee was up for sale at Sotheby’s as part of a non-fungible token, with a starting bid of only just $1,000 has now reached $2.8 million at the end of the auction.
The digitally signed Ethereum blockchain non-fungible token (NFT), a digital resource that logs ownership, contains the source code, an animated visualization, a letter written by Berners-Lee, and a digital poster of the full code from the original files.
World Wide Web was developed in 1989 by a London-born computer scientist ‘Berners-Lee’, transforming the ability to share and innovation of information in what is viewed as one of the most remarkable inventions since the print press appeared in Europe in 15th Century Germany.
NFTs have exploded in popularity in recent months. The costliest NFT known sale to date was in March 2021, when a digital patchwork by the American artist Mike Winkelmann, also known as Beeple, went on to sell for $69.3 million at Christie’s. It was the first-ever sale through a major auction of a piece of art that has no physical existence.
Since then, no NFT sale is known to have been close to this amount. In June, a single “CryptoPunk” NFT – a pixelated image of a cartoon face – fetched $11.8 million at Sotheby’s.
