World Wide Web source code to be sold as an NFT

Auction house Sotheby’s will put up for auction 9,555 lines of source code underpinning the World Wide Web. reports.

The lot is linked to an NFT confirming its authenticity and unique ownership. The auction winner will also receive a letter from the code’s author, the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, recounting the process of its creation, and a 30-minute video visualising the event.

While working at CERN’s research laboratory in the late 1980s, Berners-Lee proposed an information-management system, described by his supervisor as “vague, but exciting”.

Subsequently, the scientist authored implementations of three languages and protocols that form a large part of the 9,555 lines of code on offer. They also include the source code for [simple_tooltip content=’HyperText Markup Language’]HTML[/simple_tooltip], [simple_tooltip content=’HyperText Transfer Protocol’]HTTP[/simple_tooltip] and [simple_tooltip content=’Uniform Resource Identifier’]URI[/simple_tooltip].

The World Wide Web is dated to 1989, but the code for the files was written between 1990 and 1991.

In April 2021, Tim Berners-Lee personally contacted Sotheby’s with the idea of selling the code at auction.

“NFTs, whether works of art or similar digital artifacts, are the latest developments in this field and the most appropriate means of ownership. They are the perfect way to package the origins of the Internet,” he wrote.

The auction will run from 23 to 30 June. The starting price of the lot is $1,000.

Proceeds from the sale will go to initiatives supported by Berners-Lee and his wife Rosemary Leith.

In May, the Tor Project, a nonprofit that operates the Tor network, sold at auction an access key to the first onion service Dusk as an NFT for 500 ETH (around $2 million at the time of the sale).

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