Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales will tokenize the first version of the site and put it up for auction. The auction will be held by Christie’s from 3 to 15 December.
The earliest version of Wikipedia, released in January 2001, will be presented in the form of a non-fungible token (NFT) recorded on the Ethereum blockchain. “What you see on the screen is what Wikipedia looked like the moment I launched the software,” Wales told The Verge.
The first words that appeared in the online encyclopedia were the phrase “Hello, World!” (“Hello, world!”), Which traditionally begins the study of programming languages. After the sale of the token, the initial version of Wikipedia will be made publicly available. Anyone can view and edit it, but after five minutes all edits will be rolled back to the original greeting.
Together with the token, Wales’ personal iMac, which he was using at the time of the launch of the site, will be put up for auction. The proceeds from the sale will go to charity and to support the work of Wales’ social network WT.Social, which, like Wikipedia, exists on donations from users.
A similar sale was held in June by World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee. He auctioned 9,555 lines of source code for the technology behind the Internet at Sotheby’s. The source code token was sold for $ 5.4 million.
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