The auction house continues its foray into the world of digital assets in its upcoming stand-alone auction, «This Changed Everything.»
Sotheby’s will be auctioning World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee’s original time-stamped source code files, signed by him, as a non-fungible token (NFT), it announced this week.
This is the auction house's first digital-born artefact to come to auction, and is being offered directly from Lee, who will use its proceeds to benefit causes supported by the MIT professor and his wife, Sotheby's said. The sale will open from 23 – 30 June, with bidding starting at $1,000. Sotheby's did not designate an estimate for the lot.
Ultimate Digital Artefact
The source code, written in the Objective C programming language, has been open source since 1993, two years after it went live, but Sotheby's said the auction is a chance for collectors to «own the ultimate digitally born artefact.»
«Until very recently, selling a digital-born artifact was not a possibility, however the advent of NFTs has now made this possible, allowing the buyer to prove that the files on offer here are the original, digital-born manuscript for the greatest and most consequential invention of modern times,» Sotheby's said in the auction catalog.
Future of Art
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are strings of code linked to a digital file that live on the blockchain, which provide verification of authenticity and ownership. Many collectors feel this is the way digital art will be collected and traded going forward.
The digital asset class recently went mainstream with the $69 million sale of a digital collage by artist Beeple, at auction by Christie's to a Singapore-based collector, who paid for the work in ether.
Sotheby's followed with its first NFT sale, which brought in $17.1 million from 28 digital artworks by crypto artist Pak. The auction house also recently started accepting ethereum and bitcoin as payment for physical works.