The internet just put $40m+ into a DAO
- A DAO, or “Decentralized Autonomous Organization,” is a community-led entity with no central authority. It is fully autonomous and transparent: smart contracts lay the foundational rules, execute the agreed upon decisions, and at any point, proposals, voting, and even the very code itself can be publicly audited.
- Ultimately, a DAO is governed entirely by its individual members who collectively make critical decisions about the future of the project, such as technical upgrades and treasury allocations.
AssangeDAO
In November, the internet banned together to raise $40m to try to buy the Constitution (here’s a great meme history recap of what went down by Trung)
The internet lost the fight (they got outbid to buy the Constitution), but won the war.Every investor’s $PEOPLE (the token that represented the constitution) went up ~30x in value.
And now, the internet’s banning together for another go at it.
$42m (13,500 eth) has been raised to try to free a man.
Julian Assange
I’m sure you’ve heard the name. He’s controversial because he founded WikiLeaks, a site that…well… leaks documents.
The site helped people ‘whistle blow’ by leaking documents about their industry. It was seen as a positive force in exposing things like the film industry, but Wikileaks had gotten a big target on its back after the site had leaked war documents. There was a video of the US killing civilians in Afghanistan and the government came after Assange.
He’s currently held in prison in the UK, and he’s trying to stay away from the US because he faces 175 years in jail if they can extradite him from the UK.
So what does this have to do with crypto?
Well, crypto has a bunch of new tools for like-minded-strangers to band together for a mission they believe in.
It’s like Kickstarter meets a Facebook group. You get a group of people together, and they have a shared bank account to go do something.
In this case, a DAO was created (AssangeDAO) to bid on an NFT where all of the proceeds go to helping free Julian Assange.
A popular NFT artist named Pak (look him up, he made $90m+ last year selling NFTs) is making a special 1 of 1 NFT called “Censored” (which he collaborated with Assange to create), and the proceeds will go towards the legal fees and raising public awareness of Assange’s trial.
The DAO was spun up to bid on and buy the NFT.
If the DAO wins the NFT, it will hold it in the group’s wallet
If the DAO loses, you can either stay in the DAO (to keep the cause going) or quit and get a refund on whatever you put in for the auction. Pretty cool.
They use a tool called Juicebox to raise money (this is where you can join the DAO), and Gnosis for the group’s wallet (there are like 6 people who all have joint control over the wallet. That makes it so that 1 person alone can’t just go spend the group’s piggy bank).
The NFT auction ends tomorrow and it will be interesting to see if they win (I bet they do).
Personally, I don’t have a strong opinion about Assange.
But I think it’s a cool example of how DAOs and NFTs can help a group of strangers fundraise and coordinate around a mission they care about.
One of the best ways to achieve justice is to expose injustice.’-Assange
