Twitter boss Jack Dorsey has sold his first tweet from over a decade ago in the form of a unique digital asset for slightly more than $2.9m.
Dorsey’s tweet – “just setting up my twttr” – made on March 21, 2006, was his first.
The tweet was sold on Monday as a Non-Fungible Token, a kind of digital certificate that has exploded in popularity so far in 2021.
The Non-Fungible Token was sold via auction on a platform called Valuables, which is owned by US-based company, Cent.
It was bought using the cryptocurrency Ether (ETH), for 1630.5825601 ETH, which was worth $2,915,835.47 at the time of sale, Cameron Hejazi, the CEO and co-founder of Cent confirmed.
The token is a digital seal of authenticity that confirms an item is one of a kind and real.
On March 6, Dorsey, who is a Bitcoin enthusiast, tweeted a link to the website where the NFT was listed for sale. He then said in another tweet on March 9 that he would convert the proceeds from the auction into Bitcoin and donate them to people affected by COVID-19 in Africa.
Each NFT has its own blockchain-based digital signature, which serves as a public ledger, allowing anyone to verify the asset’s authenticity and ownership. They can be attached to digital art or pretty much anything else that comes in digital form – audio files, video clips or animated stickers.
NFTs have recently swept the online collecting world where they are being used to solve a problem central to digital collectables: how to claim ownership of something that can be easily and endlessly duplicated.
A digital artwork by the artist Beeple sold for more than $69.3m in an online auction by a British auction house earlier this month, with an NFT as a guarantee of its authenticity.
Cent confirmed the buyer is Sina Estavi. Estavi’s Twitter profile, @sinaEstavi, says he is based in Malaysia and is CEO of blockchain company Bridge Oracle. When asked for comment about the purchase, Estavi told the Reuters news agency he was “thankful”.
Dorsey receives 95% of the proceeds of the primary sale, while Cent receives 5%.
