Wikipedia Co-Founder’s First Post to Be Sold as an NFT

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales is auctioning off “The Birth of Wikipedia”, made up of the very first post on the reference site in the form of a non-fungible token (NFT), along with the strawberry iMac computer used by Wales when Wiki launched on January 15, 2001.

The token will be sold through London-based auction house Christie’s and will run until December 15. Part of the proceeds will be used to support WT.Social, “a decentralised, non-commercial social network free of advertising, tracking, information harvesting, and misinformation”, which Wales launched in 2019.

The NFT, which reads “Hello, World!”, written on the Ethereum blockchain, will be launched as a JPEG and will incorporate an interactive feature – allowing the buyer to edit the window, along with a timer that will reset it to its original state after five minutes. Christie’s hopes that the NFT will sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars, as this novel art form has become a staple of auction houses and the art market.

When Wales sent out his initial greeting in 2001, he could not have imagined that the project would grow so massively. “I always say I’m a pathological optimist,” he admits. “I thought if we did a really good job we might be a top 100 or top 50 website, but I didn’t really know that we would have this really fundamental impact.”

Today, Wikipedia has recorded 228 million daily visitors in the past month, with each person reading nearly four minutes online from Wiki’s 6,408,480 articles.

Exciting Developments in NFT World Where ‘Cool’ Rules

Amid the current market hype, NFTs have facilitated a number of, for lack of a better word, “cool” events to take place. What could be cooler than owning a unique piece of internet history such as the first Wikipedia entry? But the question remains, why even buy the NFT if you can’t show it off?

Cyber now offers its users NFT bragging rights by making “virtual reality NFT galleries” available. By using Cyber’s platform, digital collections can be displayed in an owner’s gallery for everyone to see. Snoop Dogg is the latest celebrity to join the craze by dropping his own NFT, and naturally, the owner is likely to want to proudly display it.