Bidding Reaches $2.5M as Twitter’s Dorsey Highlights NFT Version of First-Ever Tweet

Bidding on the genesis tweet is heating up.

On Friday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey called attention to a tokenized version of his first tweet on the non-fungible token (NFT) platform Valuables. Even though the 2006 tweet was minted in December 2020, Dorsey's Friday tweet has ignited a bidding war, reflecting today's frothy market for crypto collectibles.

As of early Saturday afternoon, the high bid was $2.5 million, made by Sina Estavi, whose LinkedIn profile describes him as CEO of Malaysia-based (and TRON-affiliated) Bridge Oracle. Estavi has been vying for the historic tweet with Justin Sun, the founder of TRON and the CEO of BitTorrent.

Valuables is an Ethereum-based platform created by the social network Cent that allows users of Twitter to authenticate their tweets for sale to others (think of them as digitally signed copies). The tokenized tweets are only sold when the author of the tweet accepts a bid.

Anyone can offer to buy a tweet on the platform. For example, the first bid for the tweet in question was $1 from @TheGaloisCxn on Dec. 15, 2020.

This is the tweet that Estavi apparently now thinks is worth $2.5 million:

Dorsey is a well-known fan of bitcoin, making multiple forays into the space. Cash App, from his other company, Square, is a major venue for retail investors to purchase the cryptocurrency. Dorsey also invested in Lightning Labs, a second layer on the Bitcoin network, seen as a scaling solution.

This is Dorsey's first time showing interest in Ethereum. Many people around the tech industry suggested that the recent boom in NFTs may partially explain Square's announcement Thursday that it would acquire the music streaming site Tidal (prior to that announcement, Dorsey announced a collaboration with rapper Jay-Z to expand the use of bitcoin in Africa).

The fight over the first-ever tweet on an Ethereum-based platform should only add fuel to that fire.

UPDATE (March 6, 13:24 UTC): Updates with latest bidding.
UPDATE (March 6, 13:42 UTC): Updates with latest bidding.
UPDATE (March 6, 14:51 UTC): Updates with latest bidding.
UPDATE (March 6, 16:20 UTC): Rewrites throughout.
UPDATE (March 6, 18:06 UTC): Updates with latest bidding.