World Wide Web founder Tim Berners-Lee poses for a photograph following a speech at the Mozilla Festival 2018 in London, Britain October 27, 2018. (REUTERS/File Photo)
LONDON – A blockchain-based token representing the original source code for the World Wide Web written by its inventor Tim Berners-Lee sold for $5.4 million at Sotheby’s in an online auction on Wednesday, the auction house said.
The source code was sold in the form of a non-fungible token (NFT) – a kind of crypto asset https://www.reuters.com/article/crypto-currency-nft-idCNL4N2LE3VG which records ownership of digital items.
The NFT was created by the English scientist Berners-Lee in 2021 and represents https://www.reuters.com/technology/world-wide-web-code-that-changed-world-up-auction-nft-2021-06-15 ownership of various digital items from when he invented the World Wide Web in 1989.
To be sure, the World Wide Web itself has not been sold. What was sold was a blockchain-based record of ownership of files containing the original source code for the World Wide Web. The final price was $5,434,500 and half of the bidders were new to Sotheby’s.
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The World Wide Web, or ‘the web’, is the system for navigating and accessing information on the internet.
The NFT is considered valuable by some because blockchain authenticates that it is one-of-a-kind and has been officially created, or ‘minted’, by Berners-Lee himself.
