Editors: Diamond; Zoe
Twitter: https://twitter.com/D_TigerResearch
Discord: https://discord.gg/Wefv4ETCag

The Sequence of AssangeDAO Event

Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, wanted to leak scandals about the US government. He has spent 7 years in hiding in Ecuador before being imprisoned in the UK. And in December last year, the British government finally decided to extradite Assange to the US, where he will serve up to 174 years in prison.

• 2022 February 3, digital artist Pak and the Assange family jointly organised AssangeDAO to launch a fundraising campaign through the JuiceBox platform to obtain the costs of defending Assange’s lawyers and other expenses to free Assange by auctioning off NFT.
• 2022 February 8, AssangeDAO has caused an outcry from community members for not adhering to its previously announced funding plan.
• 2022 February 9, after two rounds of funding, AssangeDAO closed its funding with 17,423 ETH raised, surpassing ConstitutionDAO’s funding amount. AssangeDAO became the number one project on the JuiceBox platform in terms of clout and funding amount in a short period.
• On February 9th at around noon, the official team announced the auction of Pak’s NFT “Clock” for the amount of 16,593.05 ETH.

The core team claimed that the funds from this auction have gone to the German Wau Holland Foundation for Assange’s defence costs. According to members of the community, the German Wau Holland Foundation has previously been funding Wikileaks exclusively.

After the auction, $JUSTICE token claim has also been opened (see the official announcement). The exchange ratio is 1 ETH = 1 million $JUSTICE. Currently, around 9,700 addresses are holding $JUSTICE.

The core team has not yet responded to specific plans for after-auction funding.

The Mystery of Assange's Identity

It was said by some members of the AssangeDAO community that Assange and Satoshi Nakamoto are both members of the Cypherpunk group, of which elites also includes the Bram Cohen, author of BitTorrent downloads, Sir Tim Berners Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, Nick Saab, the man who put forward the concept of smart contracts, Sean Parker, co-founder of Facebook, etc. In fact, Satoshi Nakamoto is a cypherpunk organization and Assange is the co-founder of it. (this information is anecdotal and for entertainment purposes only).

When Assange was arrested in 2019, most members of the bitcoin community were willing to donate money in support of him. This may be a "debt of gratitude," according to Cobra, the owner of Bitcoin.org. As Assange endorsed Bitcoin when it was still unknown and used it as a primary means of funding, Wikileaks was in some ways the first to bring Bitcoin to public attention.

The Core Team of AssangeDAO

Assange’s lawyer: Jen Robinson

Assange’s brother: Gabriel Shipton

Assange’s fiancée: Stella Moris

Community host: Joshua

Partner: Pak

Pak is a famous digital artist in the crypto industry and the author of the $90+ million NFT the Merge, as well as Fomoverse, LostPoets, etc. Pak is completely anonymous, no one even knows if Pak is a single person or a team. And Pak is called the Satoshi of NFT. (Pak’s Twitter @muratpak)

Governance of the DAO

AssangeDAO has developed an initial governance model. Community members will first share draft proposals in the forum for community discussion. Then there will be an initial review (whether to initiate a vote) by a review team consisting of Jen Robinson, Gabriel Shipton, Stella Moris and community moderator.

NFT in Community

“Censored” is an NFT collection in collaboration with Assange and renowned digital artist Pak that is set to be auctioned on February 7th 2022 over 48 hours. The collection consists of a 1/1 dynamic NFT called Clock and a dynamic open edition in which anyone can participate and pay what they want. Proceeds from Clock go 100% to Julian Assange's defence.

Meanwhile, the other part of the open NFT (X/X) is minted by community members for a limited time of 48 hours with no limit on the number of NFTs, after which the minting channel will be closed. Each NFT is created with a crossed-out image of a letter, reflecting the theme of Pak's NFT design - censorship - and there are currently 29,752 entries of Censored being minted on OpenSea. However, this NFT will only be truly owned by users when Assange is released.

Why didn’t the team adhere to its previously announced funding plan?

There are two controversies of AssangeDao's initial financing： 1. Not issuing tokens immediately at the time of raising funds; 2. Opening the second round without permission. The controversy over both measures still exists in the community. Many members were deeply distrustful of AssangeDao's team. Some even thought it was a fraud, but many were not sure why.

McKenna, one of the official team, explained in the discord group: they were not clear about the JuiceBox contract, and they thought the funding cycle could be extended, while the truth was they can’t extend the period anymore. AssangeDAO's popularity and the team's fundraising target had not been reached, so they had to roll over to the second round. Also, the team announced that there would be no third round. Now the funding activity of AssangeDao has been completed, with a total of 17,423 ETH raised. In a short period, AssangeDAO quickly surpassed ConstitutionDAO, which originally ranked first in the Juicebox platform project.

Where will the money go after the auction of NFT?

After the auction ended on 9th February, a new round of controversy began in the DAO community: AssangeDAO raised 5% of the funds for the handling fee of the JuiceBox platform, and the remaining 95% was used for the auction of NFT. The auction price was 16,593.05 ETH, breaking the record of the most expensive NFT price in history. It was more like a fixed price than an auction, and it was intentional by the team. Assange's brother is more directly expressed that he wants to use the maximum amount of money to auction NFT as the cost of Assange's defence. Why would AssangeDAO's team bother to "free" Assange by auctioning NFT?

There is undoubtedly a familiar argument of Dump and Pump in AssangeDAO.

Its series of suspicious fund-raising behaviors undoubtedly caused panic and suspicion among some investors.

While another part of the circle believes that the AssangeDAO team will never use such a huge amount of money just as a defence fee for lawyers. The German foundation AssangeDAO cooperates with has a deep relationship with the Assange family. In addition to supporting lawyer defence fees, the funds raised are likely to be used to promote WikiLeaks, re-run its media organization, increase the communication capabilities and use public voice to compete with the U.S. government. The huge potential contained in this will undoubtedly help AssangeDAO's long-term development.

Others believe that it is more likely that the bulk of this huge sum will go to Pak, who will continue to empower AssangeDAO.

Some people even believe that Vitalik Buterin’s support for AssangeDAO is enough to make people rush for it.

What is $JUSTICE and what it’s utility?

$JUSTICE is AssangeDAO's governance token and will be used to determine the future roadmap for how to handle NFT and DAO. The tokens will be allocated within 48 hours of the DAO's completion of the auction.

2022-02-09, 12:00 UTC, AssangeDAO completed the auction at the price of 16593 ETH and opened the JUSTICE token collection (see the official announcement for the method of collection).

JUSTICE contract address: 0x59d1e836F7b7210A978b25a855085cc46fd090B5, please verify the contract address before any secondary market transactions.

What’s the relationship between JuiceBox and AssangeDAO?

AssangeDAO is fundraising through the JuiceBox platform. Likes ConstitutionDAO, AssangeDAO has a 0% discount rate and reserved tokens, which means AssangeDAO has no reserved tokens for the team. Note that AssangeDAO does not have a fundraising target and users cannot redeem overbrim ETH.

JuiceBox charges a 5% fee on all projects raised on its platform and uses its token JBX in return for a payout at the end of the fundraising process. AssangeDAO paid JuiceBox a fee of 830 ETH at the end of the fundraising and currently holds the fourth largest JBX shares in JuiceBox’s token allocation at 3.4%.

JuiceBox has given a new solution to DAO vault management by pre-committing the funds needed for projects and their use and then raising funds from the community, and from its current operations, it has attracted hundreds of fundraising projects. With the emergence of ConstitutionDAO and AssangeDAO, which have received attention from across the crypto community, Juicebox's governance experiment is progressing rapidly and is already making its mark. However, a well-functioning DAO requires more than just JuiceBox, and there are many other issues.

Risk Warning

Although the time for AssangeDAO to raise funds on JuiceBox has ended, it is important to note that donating AssangeDAO is an act of giving and should not be viewed with an investment mindset.

And given the background and performance of the project parties and the community atmosphere, there is a high risk of participation:

• It is rumoured that AssangeDAO’s community founder JB87 is fluent in Chinese, and he never responded to the community’s question in discord channel after the announcement of the NFT auction end and claim of JUSTICE token.
• And it’s rumoured that partner Pak had threatened AssangeDAO for removing NFT if AssangeDAO does not use all the funds to auction as agreed (possibly with the aim of driving traffic to Pak itself)
• In the discord channel, most people were concerned about the price of JUSTICE, and few were concerned about Assange, whom the DAO was trying to “rescue”.
• Many people were kicked out of the community for raising legitimate questions and causing dissatisfaction with the mod.
• Members of the community are now preparing to launch a proposal on the official forum to demand a refund of the 5% fee charged by JuiceBox and the handing over of contractual rights.

Whether the AssangeDAO community can be successfully built up to meet or even surpass the previous ConstitutionDAO will depend on the joint efforts of the core team and the community members. We hope that AssangeDAO will uphold the principles of openness, transparency and democracy in its future governance. And hoping Mr Assange will soon be free from the pain of imprisonment.

For more information on AssangeDAO, please follow our official Twitter: @D_TigerResearch
Our Discord opened a channel for discussion on AssangeDAO, and you can get real-time information from AssangeDAO official announcement: https://discord.gg/Wefv4ETCag

All contents of this article represent the author's personal views and do not constitute any investment advice.

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