Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s first post on the social media platform was sold as a nonfungible token for $2,915,835.47 on Monday after a two-week open bid.
Dorsey said he would convert the winning bid into bitcoin and donate it to the charity GiveDirectly’s Africa Response.
The tweet, “just setting up my twttr,” was sent March 21, 2006.
The winning bidder is Sina Estavi who, according to his Twitter, is the CEO of a blockchain company called Bridge Oracle.
A nonfungible token, more commonly known as an NFT, is a unique kind of digital asset that has skyrocketed in popularity this year.
An NFT is not actual ownership, copyrights or trademark of a digital item. Functionally, it’s more like proof of having an original in the form of a unique cryptocurrency token. Anyone can download a picture even after someone buys an NFT of it.
The lifespan of digital items are stored on the Ethereum blockchain, a public ledger, which will display who was the first to “own” it.
People have been pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into the new market, spending breathtaking sums on NFTs for anything from tweets to clips of basketball highlights to music video snippets.
NFTs have come under criticism for the potential environmental impacts of having to produce more cryptocurrency, something which takes an incredible amount of processing power.