Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s original source code for the web, preserved in unique digital aspic, was sold for $5.4m at auction on Wednesday.
The medium here was a non-fungible token (NFT), a crypto certificate of provenance and ownership that Berners-Lee likened to an autographed book. The sale had “offered me the opportunity to look back in time to the moment I first sat down to write this code 30 years ago, and reflect on how far the web has come since then, and where it could go in the decades to come,” he said.
While the amount raised suggests the popularity of NFTs may be waning, they do promise a permanence, purity and authenticity sadly lacking elsewhere on the web, as its founder may well have realised as he looked back.
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