If you're reading this news post right now, you have been making use of the World Wide Web. Easily one of the most relevant inventions in humanity's history, the World Wide Web has become an inextricable part of our lives, either personal, technological, commercial, political, or otherwise. It has become a fabric of reality, and has been the enabler of technological innovations such as the blockchain (in all possible protocols and permutations that currently exist), as well as an enabler for NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens). An NFT is a guaranteed, authenticated original digital file, essentially - and it doesn't matter how many copies of a given digital file are eventually made, the nature of the blockchain makes it so that ownership of the original work is crystal clear throughout the public blockchain sphere.

As such, it's in one way poetic that the Internet's source-code, as developed by Tim Berners-Lee, has now been married to an NFT - a piece of art that exists only in the online world. Auctioned with a $1,000 starting bid, the NFT for the world wide web includes the original time-stamped programming files, containing 9,555 lines of code written by Berners-Lee. This includes the implementations of the languages and protocols ( HTML, HTTP, and URIs) also written by Tim, and which are still the cornerstone of today's internet. The NFT also includes a 30-minute animated visualization of developers writing the code, a letter written by Berners-Lee where he explains the creation process, and a digital "poster" of the code featuring a graphic of his signature. All four items are digitally signed, and are thus authenticated as non-fungible originals - which led to the NFT's final sale price of $5.4 million.