“just setting up my twttr,” was the first-ever thing tweeted on social media Twitter. It was tweeted on March 21, 2006 by none other than its founder Jack Dorsey, who is now selling it at an auction, with bidding reaching as high as $2 million. Selling virtual objects through blockchain technology is gradually becoming a new trend now, and the $2 million bid is clearly an indication of that.

According to NDTV, on Friday, Dorsey posted a link to “Valuables @Cent,” an online marketplace for tweets where, the site says, investors or collectors can “buy and sell tweets autographed by their creators.”

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The top bid Saturday for Dorsey’s tweet — $2 million — came from Justin Sun, the founder of TRON, a platform for blockchain, the technology underlying cryptocurrencies. He also heads the BitTorrent streaming platform.

“The creator of a tweet decides if they would like to mint it on the blockchain, creating a 1-of-1 autographed version,” Valuables explains.

Buying a tweet means purchasing “a digital certificate of the tweet, unique because it has been signed and verified by the creator,” according to Valuables.

In Dorsey’s case, the tweet itself remains visible to all, so long as he and Twitter leave it online.

The approach is much like the online sales of dramatic digital “moments” from National Basketball Association games; the short video sequences remain visible for free on the internet but a blockchain-backed “Non-Fungible Token” (NFT) is generated to guarantee the identity, authenticity, and traceability of the video, confirming its value.

Thus, a 10-second clip showing a spectacular sequence by basketball superstar LeBron James fetched $208,000 on the NBA Top Shot site late last month.

In 2019, Sun paid $4.6 million in a winning bid to lunch with iconic billionaire Warren Buffett. Sun reportedly tried but failed to convince the elderly investor of the value of bitcoins.

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