“Merry Christmas”. This is probably what hundreds of thousands of French people will wish each other on Christmas Eve. But it is also the message that appeared in the very first SMS in history, received on December 3, 1992 at 6:09 p.m. on an Orbitel 901 phone by Richard Jarvis, then director of the operator Vodafone.
This historic text will be auctioned by the French house Aguttes in Neuilly-sur-Seine (Hauts-de-Seine), this Tuesday, December 21, with an estimated selling price of between 100,000 and 200,000 euros. In a statement, the company Vodafone pledged to donate the entire amount collected to the United Nations refugee agency.
Sold as NFT
This very first SMS in history will be sold in the form of NFT, authenticated digital objects. The purchaser will therefore receive a simple digital ownership certificate, signed by Nick Read, the current CEO of Vodafone. In addition to the certificate, he will receive some physical objects such as a photo of the cell phone displaying this very first SMS, but also a screenshot of the computer code of the communications protocol used.
This is not the first time that such an “item” belonging to the history of new technologies has been put on sale. The first email, the first tweet and the very first site have already been sold as NFT, for prices reaching several million dollars.
NFTs (for “non-fungible tokens”) are certificates of authenticity associated with a virtual object that they thus make unique. Almost unknown a year ago, they represent for some the new goose that lays golden eggs on the contemporary art market.