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The buyer also got a little something to touch
Photo: CHRISTOPHE PETIT TESSON / EPA
The world's first SMS from 1992 was auctioned on Tuesday.
The short message offered as a so-called “Non Fungible Token”, or NFT for short, achieved a price of 107,000 euros on Tuesday in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris.
The seller of the SMS was the telecommunications group Vodafone.
The company says it wants to donate the money to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR).
The proceeds were at the lower end of the range of 100,000 to 200,000 euros estimated by the Aguttes auction house.
The abbreviation NFT denotes digital ownership certificates whose authenticity is confirmed using blockchain technology.
A file like the short message from 1992 that has now been auctioned off becomes a unique, non-copiable collector's item that can be sold or exchanged like a real good.
There were a few extras for free
After the auction on Tuesday, the buyer, who was not mentioned by name, got a few real things to touch and show his new collector's item in addition to the SMS code.
One of them was a digital picture frame on which a cell phone and SMS can be seen.
The auction house's development manager, Maximilien Aguttes, advertised the SMS-NFT as evidence of a momentous moment: the short message changed the type of communication forever.
"This first text message from 1992 is a historical testimony to human and technical progress."
The content of the message, however, was profane.
The programmer Neil Papworth, who works for Vodafone, sent the original SMS in December 1992 to a colleague who was at the company's Christmas party.
Its content: »Merry Christmas«.
Millions in prices for intangible collectibles
There has been a real hype about NFTs in recent months, with collectors paying millions for digital paintings, music and videos.
One of the highlights was the auction of the graphic designer Beeple's "Everydays: The First 5000 Days" collage at Christie's auction house for a staggering 69 million dollars.
The sale of the NFT of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey's first tweet raised $ 2.9 million this spring.
In the summer, the first source code for the World Wide Web (WWW) by Tim Berners-Lee was sold as NFT for 5.4 million dollars (around 4.8 million euros).
An image file showing the first entry that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales wrote in the online encyclopedia was worth $ 750,000 to an unnamed buyer in December.
mak / dpa