Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, auctioned the first-ever edit made on the site as an NFT.
When he launched the website on January 15, 2021, he typed the words “Hello, World!”. The moment has been saved as an NFT and sold as $750,000 at Christie’s on Wednesday.
A non-fungible token, or NFT, is a piece of digital content linked to the blockchain. NFTs have seen a huge spike in interest this year, and many big names are joining the trend.
Wales is no exception as he became a part of the bandwagon. Initially, Christie’s estimated that the NFT would bring something between $100,000 and $150,000. However, the sale proved the surging interest of people in digital collectibles.
Wales initially tried to build Nupedia, but the project didn’t work because it took very long to approve the edits.
Wales termed the project too rigid as it was quite academic and didn’t offer any fun to the volunteers.
Larry Sanger, the Wikipedia co-founder, proposed making edits on the web pages, and the collaboration led to massive success.
Wales said that they did as much work within two weeks as in almost two years.
Initially, anyone could make edits, causing loss of previous data. But then Wales started backing up the data to reverse any changes made. The code is a part of the NFT put up for auction.
The iMac used to create Wikipedia was also on sale, fetching a whopping $187,500.
The NFT buyer will be able to edit the NFT and then revert it to the original form.
Talking about his beloved project, Wales said, “to express artistically what I think was meaningful about that moment of potential and excitement — that you might make something amazing, or you might make something that doesn’t work at all.”
A portion of the sales will go towards WT.Social, an alternative social media project by Wales.
