An NFT representing the first page of Wikipedia has just been auctioned for more than 660,000 euros. This JPEG image represents what the encyclopedia looked like when it was created in 2001.
This Wednesday, December 15, Christie’s, a famous London auction company, sold an NFT (non-fungible token) of Wikipedia’s first page for auction for the sum of 750,000 dollars (approximately 664,450 euros). For those who do not know, an NFT is a digital certificate that allows works of art to be authenticated by registering them in a blockchain, a decentralized, resilient and tamper-proof register.
The non-fungible token had been put on sale twelve days earlier for $ 100. This JPEG file shows what Wikipedia, the famous universal encyclopedia, looked like when Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, co-founders of the website, uploaded the first page. “What you see displayed is what Wikipedia looked like when I configured the software”, says Jimmy Wales. Christie’s specifies that this file is interactive. The acquirer will be able to edit the document in order to “recreating the experience of building Wikipedia ”.
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Profits generated by the NFT will finance an alternative social network
In the process, the auction house put up for sale a strawberry-colored iMAC that once belonged to Jimmy Wales. It is about the computer which made it possible to put online the first page of Wikipedia on January 15, 2001, more than 20 years ago. “This is his personal computer, which he was using for development and research when the site was launched”, explains Christie’s. The computer was sold for 187,500 dollars (approximately 166,100 euros) at Christie’s New York headquarters.
Jimmy Wales has pledged to use the funds raised to develop an alternative social network to Facebook and others : WT.Social. According to the American businessman, it is a “Decentralized, non-commercial social network, free of advertising, data collection or disinformation and non-toxic”.
A few months earlier, an NFT of the web’s source code was sold for $ 5.4 million by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, in association with Sotheby, another UK auction house. which exploits the blockchain and the innovations of the cryptocurrency sector. According to a report by Nonfungible.com, the NFT sector continues to grow, with nearly $ 6 billion in transactions on the Ethereum blockchain in the third quarter of 2021.
