Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of World Wide Web, has sold the original source code as NFT for $5.4 million. It was sold to an unidentified buyer, through auction house Sotheby's. The auction started on the 23rd of June, with an opening bid of $1,000.

An NFT is a digital certificate of authenticity that confirms an item is real and one of a kind by recording the details on a blockchain digital ledger.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. He invented the Web while at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory. He wrote the first web client and server in 1990. His specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined as Web technology spread.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee

In March this year, Twitter CEO and Billionaire bitcoin advocate Jack Dorsey sold a digital version of his very first tweet from March 2006, which says "just setting up my twttr," to Bridge Oracle CEO Sina Estavi for more than $2.9 million

After the announcement of the NFT auction, Sir Tim told the Guardian: "The core codes and protocols on the web are royalty free, just as they always have been.

"I'm not selling the web – you won't have to start paying money to follow links.

"I'm not even selling the source code.

"I'm selling a picture that I made, with a Python program that I wrote myself, of what the source code would look like if it was stuck on the wall and signed by me."

Sotheby's described the lot as "the only signed copy of the code for the first web browser in existence", comparing its sale to that of the handwritten documents of a historic figure.