World Wide Web Code Sold as a NFT for Millions

On June 30, Sotheby's auctioned off a NFT work for the original code of what many consider to be the world's greatest invention, at least in modern times: the World Wide Web.

Bidding started at a paltry $1,000 but rose rapidly thanks to bids from 51 different bidders who participated in the hunt for the NFT plant, which became one of the ten most expensive sold at auction at $5.4 million.

Related: Digital Art Makes History at Auction

Tim Berners-Lee, an English computer scientist, designed the auctioned code, with is accompanied by a certificate, the background history and Lee's digital signature. The money from the sale will go to the charity that Tim and his wife Rosemary Leith founded.

The record price for a NFT was set earlier this year in March with Beeple's Everydays: The First 5000 Days, which sold at Christie's for the astounding sum of $69 million.

Beeple's work 'Everydays: The First 5000 Days' which sold at Christie's for $69 million. Photo © Christie's

NFT is a crypto technology that is used in the sale and ownership of digital art, among other things. The simplest explanation is that each token corresponds to a unique part of a blockchain that creates a kind of digital fingerprint, which means that you can forever follow it to verify ownership and provenance.

Among the new, young millionaires, NFT is one of the major investment areas with a lot of interest in crypto art. This is a particularly lucrative product at an opportune time as auction houses look to recoup losses from the Covid-19 pandemic.

Thanks to the combination of the new art form and cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, which has so far been a contributing prerequisite for record prices, 2021 is expected to be a record year in the auction industry.

While many collectors and crypto experts believe that the sale of Tim Berners-Lee's work is a milestone and a historic sale of everyone's digital history, others believe that the speculative, yet young and relatively untested market is the beginning of the end of the "eternal" boom that has prevailed after the financial crisis of 2008-2009.

The unidentified buyer of the NFT received a blockchain certificate ownership of the original time-stamped files with the code, a poster, a video and a signed letter from Tim Berners-Lee. If it's worth $5.4 million, or $46 million, the future will tell. One thing that is certain is that so far the new art audience is eager to spend cryptocurrency on the new art form.

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About the author

Pontus Silfverstolpe

Pontus Silfverstolpe is a co-founder of Barnebys. With more than 25 years in the art and auction industry, he is a valued speaker and recurring columnist in several magazines. He is also the initiator of Barnebys Magazine and hosts the Barnebys podcast "Eye of the Beholder". Pontus appreciates everything from baroque sculptures to contemporary art and loves working in the world's most sustainable industry full of fantastic stories and amazing people.