The March 2006 message was put up for auction. What does it mean to buy a tweet?

The CEO of  Twitter, Jack Dorsey, has put up his first tweet uploaded to the social network for sale and the highest offer received so far reaches two million dollars, a sign of the appetite for these virtual pieces.

“just setting up my twttr,” the platform founder tweeted on March 21, 2006.

Dorsey uploaded to the social network a link from the site “Valuables“, where Internet users can make an offer. The highest as of Saturday, at $2 million, is from Justin Sun, founder of TRON, a blockchain platform, the main technology used for cryptocurrencies, and owner of the BitTorrent streaming site.

“The creator of a tweet decides if he would like to cast it on the blockchain to create a unique authenticated version,” the tweet auction site explains.

Buying a tweet means acquiring “a digital certificate of the tweet, unique because it has been signed and verified by the creator,” the company explains on its question and answer page.

Dorsey’s tweet remains visible to all, as long as the author himself or Twitter keep it online.

The same happens with the video sequences of basketball games, which are still visible for free on the internet even after they have become an “NFT”, a “non-fungible token”, or a non-fungible token: an object virtual identity, authenticity and traceability in theory incontestable and inviolable, thanks to the technology known as “blockchain”.

A ten-second video of action by NBA star LeBron James sold for $ 208,000 on Top Shot in late February.

Launched in early October by Dapper Labs, in association with the NBA, Top Shot allows you to buy and sell these video clips, called “moments,” at prices that vary according to their rarity.

Since the beginning of the year, Top Shot has generated more than $ 200 million in transactions, according to a Dapper Labs spokesperson.

The “NFT” have been fashionable among collectors for a few months, to the point that Christie’s auctioned, for the first time at the end of February, an entirely digital work sold thanks to this technology.

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