Sure, there’s an economic recession with no end in sight, but Jack Dorsey’s first tweet is available for an ungodly sum of money if you happen to have that much lying around.
The Twitter co-founder and CEO tweeted out a link to a digital auction for the right to own his very first tweet in non-fungible token (or NFT) form on Friday. The price has periodically skyrocketed ever since, with the highest offer sitting at a whopping $1.5 million at the time of this writing. It was a mere $1 million about half an hour prior, to give you an idea of how fast it’s going up.
To be clear, this is what people are trying to spend that much money on:
If you haven’t been following the current NFT frenzy, they can essentially act as digital collectibles that verifiably belong to whoever buys them because they live on the blockchain. Something like Dorsey’s tweet won’t disappear from public view when it gets sold, but the certificate of ownership could theoretically appreciate in value over time, potentially netting the owner a handsome payday (or unfathomable losses) down the road if they decide to sell.
Dorsey’s tweet is being sold on a site called Valuables, which states in its FAQ that what you’d actually be getting is a “digital certificate of the tweet, unique because it has been signed and verified by the creator.” In other words, it’s like a high-tech autograph.
Techskylight reached out to Twitter to verify that Dorsey himself is selling the tweet, rather than a separate party, but Twitter declined to comment.
Again, it needs to be emphasized that there are absolutely zero guarantees that this NFT version of Dorsey’s tweet from the age of online innocence will ever be worth anything. Whoever winds up getting the tweet is betting on the idea that online artifacts will one day be as sought after as a Sandy Koufax rookie card. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. Either way, get ready to see a whole lot more of this as 2021 rumbles ahead.