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- Sir Tim Berners-Lee is selling the code he used to create the world wide web – as an NFT.
- The NFT also includes a 30-minute animation and a letter written by Sir Tim.
- NFTs are products that operate as digital assets, but can't be directly exchanged with each other.
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee is selling the code he used to create the world wide web in 1989 as a non-fungible token (NFT).
Sir Tim, who is British, invented the world wide web as the first hypermedia browser, allowing users to create and navigate links between files across a network of computers.
The NFT includes the original archive of dated and time-stamped files containing the source code, which is around 9,555 lines long.
It also includes a 30-minute animation of the code being written and a graphic representation of the full code, created by Sir Tim from the original files using Python. It also includes a letter written by Sir Tim reflecting on the code and his process of creating it.
"It has been fun to go back and look over the code," he wrote in the letter that accompanies the NFT. "It is amazing to see the things that those relatively few lines of code, with a help of an amazing growing gang of collaborators across the planet, stayed enough on track to become what the web is now."
The NFT, called This Changed Everything, goes to auction at Sotheby's auction house on June 23. The auction closes a week later.
Sir Tim and his wife will give the proceeds from the sale to causes they support, The BBC reported.
NFTs are products that operate as digital assets, but can't be directly exchanged with each other, unlike cryptocurrencies, Insider's Grace Kay wrote.
"No one NFT is the same as another, they are characterized by their unique qualities, as well as authenticity," Kay wrote. "The digital tokens often operate as a type of collectors item and cannot be duplicated."
Digital artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, sold a crypto-art piece as an NFT for nearly $70 million in March.