The AssangeDAO was formed to help Wikileaks founder Julian Assange fight extradition to the United States. Now the DAO has raised more than $53 million and bought an NFT from Assange. The blockchain mechanisms at work here appear to have enormous impact on fundraising.
AssangeDAO raised 17,422 Ether ($53 million) for Julian Assange. This money is intended to help the WikiLeaks founder take legal action against extradition to the United States.
“The Network of Solidarity with Assange”
The Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) was founded in mid-December in a Telegram group. Shortly before, the London High Court had overturned a previous court decision, which had prohibited Assange's extradition to the United States because of health problems. The DAO now wants to help Assange avoid extradition to the US, where he faces up to 175 years in prison.
"By mobilizing the network of solidarity with Assange, we hope to send a powerful signal that the period of passivity is over," according to the DAO's website. "A new era of cypherpunk organizing has dawned."
Shortly after the formation of the DAO, Assange's brother Gabriel Shipton joined the group. He and his brother planned to raise money through an NFT collection, for which he collaborated with digital artist Pak.
The model was the former Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht. He had raised $12 million through an NFT collection and with the help of the FreeRossDAO.
Crowdfunding mit NFTs
Julian Assang and Pak created two types of NFTs called “ Censored ”: First, a collection to which anyone can contribute by submitting text, which is then crossed out and an image appears as the NFT. You can see that on the NFT marketplace OpenSea , for example.
Second, and this is what this is about, Assange and Pak created a digital clock that shows the number of days Assange has been imprisoned. This is also offered as an NFT.
Julian Assange had lived at the Ecuadorian embassy in London from 2012 to 2019, where he was granted asylum from prosecution. In April 2019, Assange was finally arrested at the embassy and sentenced to 50 weeks in prison for evading justice by fleeing. After 50 weeks, Assange remained in detention because the United States had requested his extradition.
The indictment in the USA triggers international protest. Journalist Heribert Prantl, formerly of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, said the lawsuit reinterpreted "reconnaissance and whistleblowing" as espionage, if not terror. Forty human rights organizations protest against the treatment of Assange. Bärbel Kofler, then the Federal Government Commissioner for Human Rights Policy and Humanitarian Aid and now State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of Economics, also protested.
Despite such objections, European governments hesitate to side with Assange or offer him asylum.
17,422 ethers in one week
The AssangeDAO does not want to just produce empty phrases, but raise the financial means through which Assange gets the best possible legal support to defend himself against extradition. If this were off the table, nothing would stand in the way of his release.
So the AssangeDAO collected Ether to bid on the clock NFT. The success is incredible: 17,422 ethers or 53 million dollars were collected within a single week. More than 10,000 people have donated, including Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin with 10 ether alone (about $32,000). Last Wednesday morning, AssangeDAO won the NFT auction.
According to artist Pak, all of the ether collected goes to the Wau Holland Foundation , which oversees Assange's defense.
Meanwhile, the Censored NFT collection has collected 670 Ether so far. That sounds small compared to the amount the DAO raised, but it still equates to $2.1 million. Pak wrote on Twitter that these should be donated to "human rights, freedom of information, digital privacy, children's education and health organizations".
$JUSTICE token as donation receipt
As befits a DAO, the AssangeDAO is "entirely community-led," according to the website.
The DAO used the JuiceBox protocol as the technical platform for crowdfunding . This is a set of smart contracts on Ethereum that help turn fundraising campaigns into DAOs. In the case of AssangeDAO, anyone who donates through JuiceBox will receive JUSTICE tokens based on the amount.
The $JUSTICE tokens are so-called governance tokens: They give the owners voting rights in decisions about the DAO proportional to the number of tokens.
The DAO itself managed the collected money through a multisig address. Well-known people in the crypto scene, such as Amir Taaki, Jared McKenna and others, have their keys. With this money, the DAO bid at the auction of the watch NFT.
The votes in the DAO were primarily intended in the event that the DAO fails to bid for the NFT. In this case, the members would have had to decide collectively how to deal with the collected Ether. However, since the DAO won the auction, the collected ethers went to Julian Assange and his NFT campaign, and the NFT into the DAO's multisig wallet.
The DAO members can now decide how to proceed. They may keep the NFT in their wallet forever, they may decide to sell it or use it as collateral for a loan to raise additional funds to support Julian Assage, Wikipedia or other whistleblowers.
The tremendous power of crypto
The AssangeDAO demonstrates once again the power of “crypto” – or, to put it another way, the power of unleashing financial flows globally and turning fundraising campaigns into DAOs through smart contracts.
When was the last time such sums of donations were collected in such a short time for such a special purpose? Compared to the $53 million that AssangeDAO has raised, the $2 million raised via Bitcoin for Canada’s Freedom Convoy pales in comparison . The concept seems to be unleashing tremendous power.
However, it is not self-evident that a donation DAO has such a success. There are numerous projects on the JuiceBox platform that have collected a maximum of one ether, usually less. According to the JuiceBox founders , to raise a lot of money you need a good goal shared by many, prominent people who manage the multisig account and an active community via Twitter, Discord, Telegram and so on.
However, when these requirements are met, crowdfunding or fundraising through a DAO can far eclipse any other method.
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