There were 14 letters at the beginning of the cell phone age: “Merry Christmas” was read by a Vodafone employee on December 3, 1992 on his cell phone. He had received the first text message in the world – now the message was auctioned for 107,000 euros.
The French auction house Aguttes auctioned the SMS as a so-called “Non-Fungible Token” (NFT, German: non-exchangeable token).
What is an NFT? Ultimately, it is a kind of digital fingerprint of an object that is forgery-proof and stored on a blockchain on the Internet for everyone to see.
The buyer of the first SMS now has this digital certificate of authenticity and is shown as the only owner of this code in an entry on the blockchain. So that he can literally hold something in his hands for his money, the auction organizers also came up with something: The highest bidder also received tangible items – such as a digital picture frame on which the SMS can be seen.
In addition to the digital NFT of the SMS, the highest bidder also received a picture frame with its source code
The certificates of authenticity are trendy. For example, this spring the first tweet from Twitter founder Jack Dorsey was auctioned as an NFT for $ 2.9 million (2.5 million euros). In the summer, the first source code for the World Wide Web (WWW) by Tim Berners-Lee was sold as NFT for 5.4 million dollars.
However, that does not mean that the auctioned items are hidden from view of other people. Example of the first tweet: Jack Dorsey auctioned it, but it can still be read on his Twitter page: “just setting up my twttr” from March 21, 2006. The NFT only refers to the real object as a reference.
The NFT of the first SMS was auctioned at Aguttes auction house, the seller was Vodafone. The company wants to donate the proceeds to the United Nations refugee agency.
When the world’s first SMS was auctioned on Tuesday in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris, one of its initiators was 5500 kilometers away: the programmer Neil Papworth, who in 1992 sent the said short message in England from a computer to a mobile phone of a Vodafone colleague , now lives in Montreal.
What does the 51-year-old think of the fact that the SMS now has a digital image? “NFTs are not my thing, I’ve never bought or sold one,” he told the German press agency. “But if people want to buy something like that – why not?” The fact that the auction brings money for a good cause and makes the buyer happy is a good thing.
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