The unnamed winner of a charity auction paid $156,000 for an NFT of the first-ever text message, sent Dec. 3, 1992 by Neil Papworth, a British computer programmer working with Vodafone who now lives in Canada. (Agence France-Presse, CTV)

Talking point: The sale underscores collectors’ appetite for ownership of pieces of digital history. Last week, an NFT of Wikipedia’s first-ever edit sold for US$750,000 in an auction at Christie’s. NFTs, which are unique tokens that act as a digital certificate of ownership, have proven useful for conferring authenticity onto things for which it would previously have been difficult to prove ownership, like digital files. As of press time, The Logic had not announced plans to auction off its first article as an NFT.