Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey now plans to convert the proceeds from the NFT auction of his first tweet to bitcoin and donate them to charity. The highest bid for the tweet is currently $2.5 million.
Jack Dorsey’s first tweet may fetch $2.5 million, and he’ll donate the NFTy proceeds to charity
The auction ends on March 21st
The auction ends on March 21st
Photo by Victor Boyko/Getty Images
is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
The auction will end on March 21st, and he plans to donate the bitcoin to Give Directly, a nonprofit that lets donors send money directly to people living in poverty. He’ll be giving the bitcoin to Give Directly’s Africa Response fund for COVID-19 relief.
Dorsey put up his famous first tweet as an NFT (which stands for “non-fungible token”) on Friday evening, and bids quickly poured in, even though Dorsey hadn’t announced when the auction would end or that proceeds would be going to charity. The current highest bid was made Saturday evening.
What’s an NFT?
NFTs allow you to buy and sell ownership of unique digital items and keep track of who owns them using the blockchain. NFT stands for “non-fungible token,” and it can technically contain anything digital, including drawings, animated GIFs, songs, or items in video games. An NFT can either be one of a kind, like a real-life painting, or one copy of many, like trading cards, but the blockchain keeps track of who has ownership of the file.
NFTs have been making headlines lately, some selling for millions of dollars, with high-profile memes like Nyan Cat and the “deal with it” sunglasses being put up for auction. There’s also a lot of discussion about the massive electricity use and environmental impacts of NFTs. If you (understandably) still have questions, you can read through our NFT FAQ.
The winner will get a “digital certificate of the tweet,” according to an FAQ on NFT auction site Valuables, where Dorsey’s tweet is for sale. However, the tweet will remain viewable on the internet for free, assuming that Twitter or Dorsey himself won’t remove it.
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