Reading the title you might be wondering how exactly a tweet can be sold. It’s digital and just a post on a platform so how can it be sold? We’ll get to that later. So Twitter founder Jack Dorsey sold his first tweet for over £2m in order to raise money for a donation to support the coronavirus response in Africa.
A digital certificate connected to the tweet was purchased in an auction by Sina Estavi, a Malaysia-based entrepreneur. Mr. Estavi said that “That is not just a tweet!”. The tweet sold just said, “just setting up my twttr”, it was tweeted on 21 March 2006. Now, this may seem like something useless but Mr. Estavi recognized the value of this tweet and said that “years later people will realize the true value of this tweet, like the Mona Lisa painting”.
You can look at the original tweet below. Mr. Estavi said that he was glad the money was being donated to charity.
Now, as promised, how exactly is a tweet like this sold?. It is a digital commodity so it can not be sold in the traditional sense and it is still available on Twitter for everyone to see and share. So what was sold was a certificate asserting the ownership of that tweet. This kind of certificate is known as a non-fungible token or NFT. This certificate is a by-product of the recent cryptocurrency wave.
They are basically just cryptography-based unique certificates of ownership stored within a blockchain ledger. These NFTs themselves cannot be copied, but the work they’re tied to like the tweet in question can be reproduced with a limit. It does not grant any other special right over the original content.
NFTs have been being used to sell stuff for a while now. Notably, Grimes, the musician, made around $6m in a digital auction selling NFTs of some of her original artwork. Beeple, a digital artist has also sold a collection of NFTs for just under £50m.