World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee is auctioning his source code as an NFT
- Tim Berners-Lee is selling the code he used to create the World Wide Web as an NFT.
- The NFT also includes a 30-minute animation and a letter written by Berners-Lee.
- NFTs operate as digital assets but can't be directly exchanged with each other.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee is selling the code he used to create the World Wide Web in 1989 as an NFT, or nonfungible token.
Sotheby's, which is auctioning the NFT, described the World Wide Web as "the first hypermedia browser/editor, allowing users to create and navigate links between files across a network of computers."
The NFT includes the original archive of dated and time-stamped files containing the source code, which is about 9,555 lines long.
It includes a 30-minute animation of the code being written; a graphic representation of the full code created by Berners-Lee from the original files using Python; and a letter from Berners-Lee reflecting on the code and his creation of it.
"It has been fun to go back and look over the code," he wrote in the letter. "It is amazing to see the things that those relatively few lines of code, with a help of an amazing growing gang of collaborators across the planet, stayed enough on track to become what the web is now."
Sotheby's is set to auction the NFT, called "This Changed Everything," on June 23. The auction closes a week later.
Sotheby's said Berners-Lee and his wife would give the proceeds from the sale to causes they support, the BBC reported.
NFTs are products that operate as digital assets but can't be directly exchanged with each other, unlike cryptocurrencies, Insider's Grace Kay reported.
"No one NFT is the same as another. They are characterized by their unique qualities and authenticity," Kay wrote. "The digital tokens often operate as a type of collector's item and cannot be duplicated."
A crypto-art piece by Mike Winkelmann, the digital artist known as Beeple, sold as an NFT for nearly $70 million in March.