The world’s first SMS costs €107,000
Sending a text message costs a few cents, but an anonymous buyer paid well over a hundred thousand for the world’s first Christmas short message service.
Text messages may not be as relevant today, but they used to be one of the preeminent means of communication in the world. So it’s no surprise that someone wanted to pay around €107,000 for NFT ownership of the world’s first text message. And in the energy of Christmas, the seller gives the full amount to charity!
SMS: Merry Christmas
The world’s first SMS was sent on December 3, 1992 by programmer Neil Papworth. He wrote “Merry Christmas” and sent the 15 characters to his colleague, Richard Jarvis, who was at their employer’s Christmas party at the time, Deutsche Welle writes.
The message was sent by Vodafone and is now also sold by that company. The SMS-NFT cost €107,000 for an anonymous buyer, but the entire proceeds will go to refugee aid organized by the United Nations.
What is an NFT?
But what exactly is an NFT and why have you been hearing so much about it lately? A non-fungible token has the same fundamentals as cryptocurrency; a special series of numbers and letters, a token, is linked to a digital object, in this case the SMS.
Because Vodafone unsubscribes from the NFT, this means that the owner has the original SMS in his hands. The anonymous buyer is officially the owner of the object and has the official NFT as proof. Even though anyone can in principle copy a digital object, the NFT still counts as the maker’s signature, as it were; this is the one and only.
