Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey just sold the first tweet ever as an NFT, or non-fungible token, for 1,630.58 ether. With the cryptocurrency trading for $1,746 per ether on Monday afternoon, that comes out to more than $2.8 million spent on Dorsey’s tweet.
The tweet — which was posted on March 21, 2006 and reads, “just setting up my twttr” — had been available for bidding since early March on the platform Valuables. The winning bid went to Bridge Oracle CEO Sina Estavi, who also has the current high bid of $1.1 million on a tweet Elon Musk listed as an NFT last week. While Dorsey’s tweet obviously cost a pretty penny, it’s still nowhere close to the record-setting $69.3 million the most expensive NFT recently fetched. (You can check out the top 15 most expensive NFTs here.)
Dorsey said on March 9 that the proceeds from the sale will “immediately” be converted to bitcoin and then donated to GiveDirectly, an organization fighting poverty in Africa.
If you’re unfamiliar with NFTs, you can think of them as digital collectibles. Right now, the most common NFTs are tied to things like art, pictures and video clips — something the NBA has already leaned into by selling highlights from players like LeBron James and Zion Williamson. NFTs are tracked using blockchain technology, the underlying ledger that tracks bitcoin and ether transactions. When NFTs are transferred, the transactions are verified by a network of computers, giving the new owner proof that they own the official asset.
“What [NFTs] signify is digital artwork that can be confirmed to be legitimate on the blockchain technology,” Oanda senior analyst Ed Moya explained. “What it really means is you’re buying art you don’t necessarily hang up on your wall, but you own the images. And what you have is an authentication — a digital certificate — that makes it extremely scarce or rare.”
Check out TheWrap’s full NFT explainer here.
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