The world's first SMS from 1992 was auctioned off as a digital code.
The “Non Fungible Token” (NFT) achieved a price of 107,000 euros on Tuesday in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris.
The seller was Vodafone, and the company says it will 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.
Non-exchangeable tokens, according to the German translation of NFTs, are digital certificates of authenticity that are secured with the blockchain data chain and are unique.
Anyone who has the code is verifiably the only owner of the SMS in the digital world.
NFTs are generally not about tangible goods, the code only refers to the objects.
Other NFTs brought in millions
At the auction on Tuesday, the buyer, who was not named, was given the SMS code, but also things to touch, including 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 testimony to 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 digital certificates of authenticity are trendy, for example, the sale of the NFT of the first tweet from Twitter founder Jack Dorsey 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.
Vodafone programmer Neil Papworth sent the world's first text message in December 1992 to a colleague who was at the company's Christmas party.
Its content: "Merry Christmas".