Twitter CEO says he'll convert what he earns from auctioning off the first-ever tweet into bitcoin and donate the proceeds to charity

• Twitter's first-ever Tweet is up for auction by the platform's CEO Jack Dorsey.
• Dorsey will donate the proceeds for the NFT to the charity Giving Directly.

Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, is auctioning off the first tweet ever as an NFT and donating the proceeds to Give Directly's Africa Response.

Dorsey tweeted the link to the NFT on March 5. As of March 9, the leading bid for the NFT was $2,500,000 and came from Sina Estavi, a cryptocurrency CEO. The auction will close on March 21.

-jack (@jack) March 9, 2021

The auction is hosted on Valuables by Cent, which is a platform for buying and selling tweets with a digital signature by the tweet's author. Bids on the platform are shown in US dollars, but will be calculated using Ethereum, which is the general cryptocurrency of choice for NFT transactions. Dorsey will then convert the Ethereum to Bitcoin to make the donation to Give Directly.

Give Directly is a nonprofit which allows donors to send money directly to people living in poverty around the world. The organization is currently fundraising for COVID-19 relief in countries across Africa as well as the US.

NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are experiencing a boom amid Bitcoin's soaring market value. Insider reported in March that NFTs are characterized by their unique signature and digital ownership preserved in blockchain.

Dorsey's NFT, like the Nyan Cat meme that was sold in February for almost $600,000, allows the winning bidder to own a part of internet history.

-jack (@jack) March 21, 2006

The Dorsey tweet went live on March 21, 2006.