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Home / Inductees in the News / Tim Berners-Lee Sells an NFT of the World Wide Web Source Code
31 July 2021

Tim Berners-Lee Sells an NFT of the World Wide Web Source Code

Tim Berners-Lee, a member of the Internet Hall of Fame’s inaugural class, recently auctioned off a copy of the original source code for the World Wide Web as a non-fungible token.

Apparently you can put a price on history. 

Tim Berners-Lee, a member of the Internet Hall of Fame’s inaugural class, recently auctioned off a copy of the original source code for the World Wide Web as a non-fungible token. After adding in auction fees, the package sold for $5.4 million, with the proceeds going to organizations selected by Berners-Lee and his wife.

Bloomberg logo

The anonymous buyer will be able to download or view the 9,555 lines of code originally written in the early 1990s. The purchase also comes with a 30-minute video showing the code being written, a digital poster, a graphic of Berners-Lee’s autograph and a letter from Berners-Lee about the process involved with creating the code. 

In a statement to Bloomberg, Berners-Lee said the auction preparation work sent him on a trip down memory lane. 

“The process of bringing this NFT to auction has offered me the opportunity to look back in time at the moment I first sat down to write this code 30 years ago and reflect on how far the web has come since then,” he said.

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