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Pursuits

The Original Code for the World Wide Web Is Being Sold as an NFT

The source code was written by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and will be sold attached to an NFT.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.

Photographer: Ed Quinn/ Ed Quinn/Corbis
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From June 23 until June 30, Sotheby’s will auction the 9,555 lines of source code that form the basis of the World Wide Web.

The code was written by the British computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1990 and 1991, and will be tied to an NFT, a smart contract that proves the code’s authenticity and unique right of ownership. The files can be accessed by the buyer through the NFT, which will contain links through which the files can be viewed online or downloaded to a computer. The winning bidder will also receive a letter from Berners-Lee “reflecting on the code and the process of creating it,” according to a release, along with a 30-minute-long video created by a graphic designer that shows the code being written.