AssangeDAO, a group of more than 10,000 Assange supporters, raises more than $52 million in digital art auction for WikiLeaks founder Assange

Assange DAO is a new group of more than 10,000 Assange supporters established to help secure freedom for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Last week, the group started its fundraising efforts to help with his legal fees and campaigns to increase public awareness of the systemic failure of our justice systems.

On February 3, AssangeDAO had raised over 14,329 ETH, around $44.8 million, according to DAO fundraising site Juicebox. Today, the group has raised more than $52 million worth of cryptocurrency from an online auction of digital art. The winning bid came from a group of supporters who had pooled their money.

In a post on Twitter, the group said:

“AssangeDAO has just placed a “maximum bid” of all of the ETH received from Juicebox contributions to bid on the @muratpak x Julian Assange “Clock” NFT. “

AssangeDAO has just placed a "maximum bid" of all of the ETH received from Juicebox contributions to bid on the @muratpak x Julian Assange "Clock" NFT.

RE: https://t.co/B8HA684eMdhttps://t.co/1hEJfHAfK4 pic.twitter.com/RCVKC6Dwue

— AssangeDAO (@AssangeDAO) February 9, 2022

Early this month, Assange collaborated with a crypto artist known as Pak to sell a collection of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) called Censored in an online auction from Feb. 7-9 to raise funds to support his case.

The highlight of the auction was an NFT artwork, Clock, that displays the number of days Assange has been imprisoned in white text on a black background. It updates each day. As of 1400 GMT, the Clock NFT has fetched 16,593 of the cryptocurrency ether, around $52.8 million.

A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO, sometimes called a decentralized autonomous corporation, is a sort of online community that allows members to pool their money and use blockchain-based tokens to vote on decisions about how the group is run.

In a Discord post, AssangeDAO community lead Joshua Bate said: “This is tens of thousands of people coming together to show real strength – the Power of the People. In less than one week, we have shown that decentralised and distributed peoples can band together to fight injustice.”

In addition to the Assange NFT, the Censored auction also allowed supporters to create their own NFTs, choosing an amount to pay and typing in a short message which gets turned into an image showing the words struck through, as though censored.