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World wide web source code as an NFT for $5.4mil

We’ve lived through the age of everything as a service and now it seems everything is an NFT, including part of the source code for the platform you’re reading this on.

Credited as the creator of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee has sold an NFT of the original source code of his creation for a cool $5 434 500 through Sotheby’s.

That price is rather high especially when you consider that the bidding started at $1 000.

“We have placed it in a public forum, we have sold it at basically no reserve (the bidding started at $1,000) and we let the market decide what the value is going to be. There have been multiple bidders who have all agreed that it’s valuable,” global head of science and popular culture at Sotheby’s, Cassandra Hatton, told The Guardian.

The NFT that was sold contains more than just source code. While there are some 9 555 lines of code, there is also a 30 minute visualisation of the code, a digital poster and a letter written by Berners-Lee reflecting on his creation.

Thanks to Sotheby’s we actually have a bit of that letter.

“It has been fun to go back and look over the code. It is amazing to see the things that those relatively few lines of code, with a help of an amazing growing gang of collaborators across the planet, stayed enough on track to become what the web is now. I have never once felt I could relax and sit back — as the web was and is constantly changing. It is not yet the best it can be: there is always work to be done,” wrote Berners-Lee.

While this is a notable NFT sale, it is not the largest by any stretch of the imagination. That honour still belongs to Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple, who sold his NFT Everydays: the First 5000 Days for a whopping $69.3 million.

As we said, everything is an NFT now, in a few years time if we fall on hard times, maybe this story will become an NFT as well.

[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]

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