How a $53-million DAO plans to free Julian Assange | Interview with AssangeDAO

For many, he is a champion of the free press. For others, he is a dangerous hacker and a criminal. Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, could face a life sentence for espionage if a London court decides to extradite him to the US Last week, a decentralized autonomous organization called the Assange Dao raised a record $53 million in support of Assange.

The fundraise showed how much support Julian Assange actually has and how much power can be wielded.

The holy grail of all this is that the charges in the US are dropped and those powers stopped pursuing Julian for publishing their secrets.

Can the power of a Dao free Julian Assange? And why is the crypto community rallying in support of the whistleblower? To find out, we talked to Assange's brother, Gabriel Shipton, and Silka Noah, Assange, Dao's core member. Welcome to another exclusive Cointelegraph interview. The Assange Dao recently managed to raise around $53 million in support of the cause of Julian Assange. So I would like to know, how do you evaluate these results? How are these funds going to be deployed exactly? And the most important thing is how likely is this initiative going to prevent the extradition of Julian Assange to, to the U.S. gabriel, you want to start?

Well, so I think, you know, this was a historical effort, you know, this is a historical moment. It's the highest amount, I think, highest amount raised through one of these, you know, we managed to raise more than Constitution Dow. So we sort of set records there the amount of people that came in, I think 10,000 members to the Dao. So that, that is another huge, huge thing. There's a 10,000 people who are all behind Julian, you know, getting Julian free. Basically what the funds will do, they will go towards Julian's defense, both legal and campaigning as well. And it will allow Julian to also do some offensive legal work, which he hasn't really had the resources to as well.

And you were mentioning the offensive defense. So what exactly do you mean by offensive defense?

So this will allow Julian to launch legal proceedings, launch legal proceedings against parties that have been involved in his persecution. So you can see that has happened say in Spain, where there's been a big, a big investigation into UC Global, who were the security company that was supposed to be guarding Julian in the Ecuadorian embassy, but it turned out that they were actually CIA assets spying on him and, you know, coming up with plans to kidnap and murder him, stealing his baby's DNA. So that's one example of an offensive legal proceeding. So Julian will be able to bring more offensive legal proceedings using these funds in different territories where his persecution has, where it's sort of the irregularities and the government corruption has been.

And most importantly, how likely do you think that this initiative is going to prevent Julian's extradition to the us Because I guess that this is the main goal of the initiative. The thing you want to prevent is that Julian is getting extradited to the US and over there, as far as I understand, he risks to be jailed for 170 years because of espionage charges. So how important, how effective do you think this campaign is going to be in preventing that outcome from happening?

Yeah, well, now Julian's going to be able to ramp up a political campaign. This is as much a political case as it is a legal case. The legal portion, you know, Julian's sort of stuck in this rat race where there's sort of the legal system just keeps him going, keeps him in prison and he sort of has to navigate through that. But it's the political side that is where this case will be won. So I think that's something that, you know, everyone focuses on the funds and what's been raised. But really the show of support and the sort of worldwide press that this show of support got really, you know, sends a message to the people who are going after Julian that there is, there is, there are supporters out there who, Julian has a huge constituency and they're, you know, they're smart people, they're wealthy people and they're willing to do something to support Julian. So it really sends a message, a political message that there is some political cost to this persecution of Julian. So I think, you know, there's, it's not just the funds, but it's this, this political side that I think is most important.

Now I would like to get into the details of the, of the auction because the funds were raised during an NFT auction called Censored that was created by Assange and digital artist Pak. So the Collection includes a 1:1 piece called clock and an open interactive edition. So maybe Silke, can you guide us through the specifics of this NFT auction?

So there are two parts of the nft. There's a one on one clock which we bid on. It's an interactive clock, actually, that counts down the days since Julian Assange's arrest. And this 101 Gluck is accompanied by the Censored collection which allowed anyone during the time of the auction to mint their own NFT with a message. So you could for example, write a message truth. And it was censored with a bar through it. And why are they interactive? Because when Julian is going to be freedom, the bar on the clock will stop and the bar will disappear on all those NFTs. This was the raise actually took place on not any NFT platform, so it wasn't on OpenSea or any of the other platforms, but it was actually self hosted. This was done to ensure that really 100% of the proceeds can actually go to Julian Assange's legal defense and pac. The artist that produced this nft, together with Julian Assange, actually is getting nothing from the one on one clock. For this was all done for free. And both of them have been working on this since May last year.

Yeah, I saw the clock piece. It's very minimalistic, but very impactful kind of piece. And also those messages were very. It's a very interesting idea that everyone can write his own message. And it's cool that when, when hopefully Assange will get liberated, then those messages will also kind of be liberated.

I think there were 29. I think 29,000 people, individuals. So 29,000 individual wallet addresses minted. You know, one of the censored pieces and one other element to those is that they are now locked to those wallets so that you can't trade them until clock sets to zero, when Julian is free. So we now have 30,000 collectors who have an interest in setting Julian free so they can trade their Julian and Puck censored nft.

Another aspect is that you could actually donate as much as you wanted to. So if you wanted to donate, I don't know, 10 ETH for that, you could. But you could also donate 0.00001 ETH, which I thought was very nice.

Yeah. Because it kind of lowered the barrier for entry so that everyone can participate, basically. Yeah, that's I guess one of the main plus of NFT technology. But I would like to get a bit more of an understanding of what is the best outcome that you would like to achieve. Like would you expect Assange to be released of all charges and be a completely free man? Or how do you expect this process to evolve in the next months? Maybe, Gabriel, you want to give us your perspective on this?

Yeah. Well, Julian. So Julian's just submitted on the first day of the auction, on 7 February, Julian submitted an application to appeal to the Supreme Court in the uk. So that's the most immediate. The most immediate result would be the UK rejecting or the UK approving Julian's appeal and rejecting the extradition, that would probably be the soonest that he would be able to walk free, I guess. You know, ideally the charges need to be dropped in the US that would be the sort of the holy grail of all this, is that the charges in the US are dropped and those powers stopped pursuing Julian for publishing their secrets.

Let's get back to the DAO mechanism. So I'm curious to know, why did you think that the DAO would be the right mechanism to raise funds for Assange? So couldn't you just ask for for example, donation in crypto? So wouldn't that be the same? Silke, you want to reply to this one?

Yeah. I mean our current world regularly and especially right now shows us the limits of individual agency. And what daos do is there are squad based communities. They help us to get this agency back. I mean, in the recent past, what we have seen, you know, we've seen financial flashmark behavior which took down VCs. The same is the case now. So daos, in a way, they are very powerful token based coordination mechanism that any person now can wield outside of the legacy financial system and economic system. And the cypherpunks wielded it to assist in freeing Assange. I mean, the Sanch Dao is by definition as an impact dao as opposed to for example an investment dao. And we use a dao to influence the legacy meat space by raising those funds for Julian Assange's legal defense. And as you just heard from Gabriel, I mean a lot of money is actually needed. Seeing all these potential prosecutions and actually ongoing one, the donations alone would not have allowed to give us those to give those who have donated this voice in the medium and long term by using a dao, we issued a token, a governance token. And that actually the DAO that way can have much more impact than just donating funds.

As you said, every single donor that participated in the campaign had right on a proportional amount of justice tokens. So what can a donor do with this justice token?

So I'll just continue and Gabriel, please chime in. So everyone who donated. So it was said that one eth got one million justice token. So the overall supply wasn't fixed, it was just fixed. By the time and how much was donated, we received more than 10,000 donations, individual donations. So as had been previously announced, the justice token is a governance token to govern the Assange Dao. The token was issued only after the race was over to ensure that there was no interaction between a secondary market and the race itself. I mean, right now I am a multisig member of the Core Wallet, which is a nosisafe. But to be able to basically somehow steward the community prior to it being seeded through this token. The plan is to immediately relinquish all governance powers to the dao. And the DAO now holds the nft. So the DAO may fractionalize it, remain it, use the remaining funds, including a 3.8% stake in the juice box DAO, to have a much wider impact than just funding the legal costs, which itself was a huge success.

Now I would like to discuss the relationship between Julian Assange and the crypto community. So, Gabriel, you have been going to cryptocurrency conferences for years trying to gather support for the cause of Julian Assange because you thought that the crypto community has like, the goals of the crypto community are totally aligned with Julian Assange's philosophy. So can you explain this connection that you see between the crypto industry and what Julian Assange stands for?

So I guess again, it goes back to the cypherpunk mailing list. You know, that's where, you know, Julian was a member of that as well as a lot of people who were the, you know, the first people to be involved in Bitcoin. So there was this alignment of philosophy philosophies There, you know, WikiLeaks, you know, was sort of decentralized news, decentralized source material in a way. Like, you know, took, took, you know, source material was usually guarded by large corporations. These media corporations, you know, they would get leaks, they would put it through their editorial, and, and you would receive, you know, you wouldn't know exactly what the documents were that were leaked. They would stay in the files of these corporations. So in a way, what WikiLeaks did was sort of decentralize those source documents so that anybody could read them. And it wasn't gone. It didn't go through the filter of the sort of corporate new structure. Also, WikiLeaks in 20, after they published the Iraq War Logs, the Afghan War Diaries, the cable set, and Siquantamo Bay detainee files in 2010, which is actually what Julian has been charged with for publishing those. After they published those, there was an extra legal banking blockade on WikiLeaks. So they took down, they confiscated, they took down their PayPal, confiscated the balances in the PayPal, Visa and MasterCard stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks. They closed down Julian's personal bank accounts. So there was this extralegal banking blockade. That was trying to starve WikiLeaks of funds to kill it. So at that time I think bitcoin was, I think it was just sort of in its beta type mode and Julian adopted it basically. And I think one of Satoshi's last posts says is WikiLeaks kick the hornet's nest and they're coming for us or something like that. So WikiLeaks ended up being the first sort of use cases as sort of uncensorable money for bitcoin and allowed WikiLeaks to keep publishing for those four years that they were cut off from the banking system. So it was the, that sort of propelled bitcoin and showed that it actually works as uncensorable money and can be used by people who are very politically compromised.

Yeah, that makes sense. Although I have a question here. So we know that there are still issues about how to cash out once you receive a big donation like the one that you realize. So those cryptos, in order to pay for those legal expenses, these offensive legal expenses and the whole support campaign for Assange, they probably will need to go through some sort of cash out off ramp points. So is it not something that. How are you gonna ensure that those points won't be censored?

Well, it'll go through. We have a sort of proven path through the WAU Holland foundation in Germany that has been taking crypto donations for Julian's defense. So there is a pathway there for these donations to be turned into fiat when they need to be and get to the lawyers, you know, to pay them.

Okay. And that's pretty safe. That's like a safe path.

Yeah, yeah. And the Wauhaland foundation has come under attack before and they've managed to resist, you know, they've resist, they've resisted attacks in the past. So they're, you know, they're sort of a resistant place. There's a lot of Julians politically in Germany. There's a lot of political support for Julian. The foreign minister in Germany has spoken out in defense of Julian. There's a large cross party group there. So there is, you know, there's a lot of political, political, you know, there's good political cover for Julian in Germany as well. So that's another layer of protection.

As far as I understand, the scope of the Assange Dao is not. This is not the end of the scope of the Assange Dao because on the Dao website you claim that a new era of Assange cypherpunk organization has dawned. And Amir Taki Another core member of the Assange Dao told the Reuters the Assange Dao represents a Rubicon that's been crossed. So what exactly do these statements mean? Maybe you want to give your perspective, Silke.

As I just mentioned first, I cannot speak for Ametake, but I think what he meant to say is that that daos in general found their way into mainstream and the mainstream will now use it to make their voices heard. Not just in relation to, I mean, not particularly to the Assange gau, but of course, I mean, the fundraise showed how much support Julian Assange actually has and how much power can be wielded. This is not going to change. You know, we cannot, I mean, basically you cannot turn back the clock on this ability to coordinate. It has not been previously possible, but it will be in the future.

I would say that no matter how do you personally relate to the figure of Julian Assange, I think that everyone could agree that the freedom of press is a paramount element for democracies. So that's what Julian Assange has been standing for. And so hopefully everything is going to be fine. And I wish you the best of luck guys, for your future initiatives.

Thank you.

Thanks a lot.