Sold for 107,000 euros: the first text message in history

The first text message in history was sold for 107,000 euros, and was auctioned on December the 24 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, the ultra-chic suburb on the outskirts of Paris and the richest municipality in France.

The intangible object was sold through NFT (non-fungible token) technology, a sort of certificate of authenticity and digital ownership.

The starting price was 100,000 euros. The message in question has just two words ‘Merry Christmas’, ‘Merry Christmas’, for a total of 15 letters. It was sent at 6:09 pm on December 3, 1992 from a computer on the phone of Richard Jarvis, a Vodafone employee at the time, as an experimental. To materialize it in the real world, the buyer was given a digital frame with the certificate signed by Nick Read, current manager of Vodafone, also because in France auction sales of strictly intangible assets are prohibited.

What is it going on?

Nft (acronym for non-fungible token) are certificates that attest to the authenticity, uniqueness and ownership of a digital object (such as an image, a video, a song or even a tweet). Non-fungible tokens are registered in a blockchain and cannot be exchanged or copied.