Oscar Holland, CNN Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, has auctioned off his invention’s source code as an NFT. It sold via Sotheby’s for $5,434,500 following a week-long online auction that began on June 23. Although the groundbreaking code has long been in the public domain, the British computer scientist authorized the sale of a single edition of his original time-stamped files. Comprising over 9.500 lines of code, the files contain the basis of the languages and protocols underpinning the internet as we know it: Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Universal Document Identified (URI). They were sold alongside an animated visualization of the code and a digital “poster” that is “signed” by Berners-Lee via a graphic signature. The winning bidder also took home a letter, written by the computer scientist, in which he reflects on the code and its creation.