AssangeDAO member Silke Noa said in an X post that out of 16,593 Ether, an estimated 11,000 ETH worth $37 million has been spent on legal defense and campaigning by AssangeDAO’s The Clock.
To free Assange, Noa explained that the 16,593 Ether (ETH) allocation was administered by the Wau Holland Foundation “out of their Safe.global multisig wallet address.”
“Arguably, there were security reasons that prevented full transparency on the fund allocation to not prejudice Julian’s case in the past. But now it is time for Wau Holland Foundation to provide a detailed accounting of how the funds were allocated, as I have previously urged repeatedly.”
Assange, an Australian journalist and activist, founded WikiLeaks, a platform that publishes classified and sensitive documents. He has been imprisoned since April 2019.
AssangeDAO's efforts through the years
Speaking with Cointelegraph, Harry Halpin, CEO of Nym, explained that:
“AssangeDAO was started by friends of Julian like myself and Amir Taaki after we saw the amount of money being raised for tokenized NFTs like ConstitutionDAO.”
Halpin explained that Nym “knew Julian’s legal team were running out of money,” due to Assange’s dire situation, they decided this “type of fund-raising could be used for his legal defense.”
Joshua Bate, core team member of AssangeDAO told Cointelegraph:
“The DAO was formed by Assange’s friends and family, alongside other participants recruited from the Web3 space, to raise money for Julian’s defence using novel fundraising mechanisms that were popular at the time."
Bate explained that the money raised was crowdsourced from “onchain and cypherpunk communities.” He said this created awareness of the situation and prompted decentralized community action.
The Pak NFT
Bate informed Cointelegraph that the funds raised onchain were used to purchase a unique one-of-one non-fungible token (NFT), which was created in collaboration with Assange himself.
“All proceeds from the sale of that NFT were then sent to Wau Holland Foundation’s onchain address and periodically off-ramped to pay for legal fees. The foundation’s innovative spirit allowed this type of onchain activism to have an impact in the real world.”
Another core team AssangeDAO member responsible for the initial design of AssangeDAO’s governance structure and work spoke with Cointelegraph about the Pak NFT:
“In some sense, perhaps this event will reunite the community again. Pak’s NFT is going to go to “0” when Assange becomes free, I believe. This DAO owns that NFT.”
The AssangeDAO core team member explained that this could be considered the first historical event in which an NFT community contributed to releasing someone from prison.
However, they state that until “everything is all settled,” there can be no celebration.