Exclusive: Why One Investor Bought an NFT of Wikipedia’s First Edit for $750K

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  • San­tos addi­tion­al­ly bought the Straw­ber­ry iMAC Wikipedia co-founder used while devel­op­ing the website
  • PleasrDAO’s NFT col­lec­tion con­sists of the pop­u­lar Doge meme, Edward Snow­den court doc­u­ments and more

An NFT of Jim­my Wales say­ing “Hel­lo world” on Wikipedia sold for $750,000 at Christie’s auc­tion house on Wednes­day. Promi­nent Web3 investor San­ti­a­go San­tos pur­chased the NFT for Pleas­r­DAO, a decen­tral­ized autonomous orga­ni­za­tion most com­mon­ly known for buy­ing the one-of-kind WuTang album, Block­works has exclu­sive­ly learned. 

“I bought it because I think it’s price­less,” San­tos said.

The bid­der, who was ini­tial­ly anony­mous, told Block­works that he spent almost $1 mil­lion on the col­lectible because it was “emblem­at­ic of Web3.”

“Wikipedia also open-sourced knowl­edge,” San­tos said, adding that the web­site has also gone through sim­i­lar stages as cryp­tocur­ren­cy. “There’s a lot of par­al­lels. We’ve [also] gone through this phase of [peo­ple see­ing] cryp­to as a scam.”

The non-fun­gi­ble token (NFT), which dis­plays co-founder Wales’ first-ever edit in 2002, was auc­tioned off along­side the Straw­ber­ry iMAC Wales used while devel­op­ing the web­site. San­tos pur­chased this at auc­tion as well on Wednesday. 

“What you see dis­played is what Wikipedia looked like at the moment that I set up the soft­ware,” Wales pre­vi­ous­ly told “The Verge,” adding that pro­ceeds from the auc­tion will go toward char­i­ties like WT.Social, a dona­tion-backed social net­work that he found­ed three years ago.

The ulti­mate buy­er of the NFT will now be able to edit the post — and change it back to its orig­i­nal appear­ance — when­ev­er they want, accord­ing to a state­ment from Christie’s. 

San­tos said that he was “shocked” at pay­ing just $750,000 for the NFT and “thought it was going to go for way more.” He said that he was pre­pared to bid a max­i­mum of “$2.5 mil­lion or more.”

“I think a lot of times when you’re col­lect­ing, you have to ask your­self, ‘Does this endure the test of time?’” San­tos said. “There’s already so much emo­tion­al and his­tor­i­cal attach­ment attached to Wikipedia.”

The NFT will be placed in PleasrDAO’s col­lec­tion, which con­sists of tok­enized Edward Snow­den court doc­u­ments, the pop­u­lar Doge meme and more, accord­ing to San­tos, who was a found­ing mem­ber of the organization.

This is not the first time a promi­nent auc­tion house has asso­ci­at­ed itself with a DAO.

The win­ning bid for the Wikipedia NFT fol­lows the explo­sive efforts around Con­sti­tu­tion­DAO, a group of more than 17,000 cryp­to investors who raised rough­ly $48.9 mil­lion to buy a copy of the US Con­sti­tu­tion at Sotheby’s in November. 

“It’s real­ly excit­ing to see these auc­tion hous­es get so embed­ded in NFTs,” San­tos said. “It speaks to where the space is going and how main­stream NFTs have become.”


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  • Mor­gan Chittum

    Mor­gan Chit­tum is a New York-based reporter cov­er­ing mar­kets, NFTs, the meta­verse and dig­i­tal assets. Before Block­works she was a street reporter at New York Dai­ly News, where she wrote about homi­cide, extrem­ist groups, state pol­i­tics and oth­er crit­i­cal top­ics in New York. She was a Media and Jour­nal­ism Fel­low at the Poyn­ter Insti­tute, where she dab­bled in data and inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism. She is pub­lished in Amer­i­can Banker, Yahoo News, Chica­go Tri­bune and more.

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