NFT of ‘www’ source code sold for $5.4 million

The world wide web, or “the web”, is the system for navigating and accessing information on the internet.

The non-fungible token (NFT) sold on Wednesday was created by the English scientist Berners-Lee in 2021 and represents ownership of various digital items from when he invented the world wide web in 1989.

According to details, Bidding began at $1,000, and bidders had a week to name their highest price in the auction, called “This Changed Everything” while the final price was $5,434,500.

The NFT attracted 51 bids and the proceeds will go toward unnamed initiatives supported by Berners-Lee.

Unlike some NFTs, the offering failed to inspire a last-minute flurry of demand; the winning bid was offered just under 10 minutes before the close of the auction.

Included in the purchase are NFTs representing about 9,555 lines of code written in 1990-1991, a 30-minute animated visualisation of the code, a digital poster of the code, and a digital letter written by Berners-Lee in June 2021, reflecting on his invention.

The sold code includes the first web browser and early versions of methods computers still use to talk with each other, including the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, known as HTTP, and HyperText Markup Language, known as HTML.

The winning bidder will remain anonymous, per auction house rules, but that could change if the buyer steps forward.

A non-fungible token (NFT) officially created, or “minted”, by Berners-Lee himself is a kind of crypto asset that records ownership of digital items and has recently become a major asset in the creative world, with NFTs of artwork, music and internet memes selling for millions of dollars.