World wide web to be sold for $5.4 million

Bidding began at $1,000, and bidders had a week to declare their highest price in the “This Changed Everything” auction.

NFTs, the popular collectible embraced by the founder of Twitter, the National Basketball Association, and the artist who created a flying cat with a Pop-Tart body, have records going back to the rise of the modern age: the source code of an early version of the World Wide Web.

On Wednesday, Sotheby’s auctioned off Tim Berners-Lee code (world wide web) in the form of a nonfungible token, or NFT, for $5.4 million with fees. Sotheby’s said that it will take cryptocurrency for both the hammer price and the buyer fee.

According to auction house standards, the winning bidder will stay anonymous, but that could change if the buyer steps forward.

Bidding began at $1,000, and bidders had a week to declare their highest price in the “This Changed Everything” auction. According to Sotheby’s website, the NFT received 51 bids, with the revenues heading to unnamed initiatives supported by Berners-Lee.

Unlike some NFTs, the offering didn’t receive a flurry of last-minute demand; the winning bid was received just under 10 minutes before the auction ended.

The code includes the original web browser, as well as early versions of methods computers, still use to communicate with one another, such as the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, and the HyperText Markup Language, or HTML.

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