These days, almost anything can be sold as a Non Fungible Token (NFT). Non Fungible Tokens first became popular in March of this year after South Carolina-based graphic designer Mike Winkelmann who goes under the name Beeple sold an NFT for $69 million at an auction. Other notable NFT sales include Jack Dorsey’s first tweet which sold for for $2.9 million, Elon Musk selling a song about NFT as an NFT and the most recent NFT sale – the sale of a rare digital avatar known as CryptoPunk which sold for more than $11.7 million.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee; the British scientist who invented the World Wide Web in 1989 is auctioning off the original source codes as a Non Fungible Token (NFT). The auctioning will be done at Sotheby’s and will the first item that was created digitally to go on auction at Sotheby’s.
The auction will start on the 23rd of June and end on the 30th of the same month and will start at a bid of $1000.
According to Sotheby’s, the digital artifact being sold as an NFT is made up of four parts – “The original time-stamped files containing the source code; a letter written by Sir Tim; an animated visualization of the code; a letter written by Sir Tim reflecting on the code and the process of creating it; as well as a digital ‘poster’ of the full code created by Sir Tim from the original files using Python including a graphic of his physical signature; all digitally signed”.
Sotheby’s also revealed that the files referenced by the NFT contain an approximated 9,555 lines of code, and that these codes deals with the process of implementing the three languages and protocols created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, which happen to be HyperText Markup Language (HTML), HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs).
When asked the reason for selling his original source codes as an NFT, Sir Tim Berners-Lee said that “Why an NFT? Well it’s a natural thing to do when you’re a computer scientist and when you write a code and have been for many years. It feels right to digitally sign my autograph on a completely digital artifact”. The proceeds from the sale of the NFT would go into the initiatives Sir Tim and Lady Berners-Lee Support.
The sales of NFT seems to have fallen this quarter compared to the last but advocates still believe that there is a bright future for NFT sales. Click here to read the story.
