On 30 June, Sotheby's auctioned off an 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 work, which became one of the ten most expensive sold at auction when it finally went for $5.4 million (£3.93 mil).
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Tim Berners-Lee, an English computer scientist, designed the auctioned code, which was accompanied by a certificate, the background history and Lee's digital signature. The money from the sale will go to a charity that Tim and his wife Rosemary Leith founded.
The record price for a nNFT was set earlier this year in March with Beeple's Everydays: The First 5000 Days, which sold at Christie's for the astonishing sum of $69.3 million (£49.9 mil).
NFT is a crypto technology 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 you can forever follow it to verify ownership and provenance.
See also: Will Blockchain Revolutionise the Art World?
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 coronavirus 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 historic milestone 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 2008-09.
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. Whether it's worth $5.4 million, or $46 million, the future will soon tell. One thing for certain is that, so far, new art audiences are eager to spend cryptocurrency on this new art form.
