Silke Noa said in an X post that out of 16,593 Ether, an estimated 11,000 ETH worth $37 million was spent on legal defense and campaigning.
Noa clarified that the Wau Holland Foundation administered the 16,593 Ether allocation “out of their Safe.global multisig wallet address.” to liberate Assange.
“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, established WikiLeaks, a platform disseminating classified and sensitive documents. Source: Silke Noa. Since April 2019, he has been incarcerated. Harry Halpin, CEO of Nym, disclosed to Cointelegraph 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.”
In light of Assange’s precarious circumstances, Nym and Halpin determined that this “type of fundraising could be used for his legal defense,” as Nym knew that Julian’s legal team was running out of funds.
Joshua Bate, a member of the core staff at AssangeDAO, disclosed to 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 clarified that the funds were crowdsourced from “cypherpunk and on-chain communities.” He stated that this heightened awareness of the situation and encouraged decentralized community action.
The Pak NFT Bate informed reporters that the funds raised onchain were utilized to acquire a distinctive, one-of-a-kind non-fungible token (NFT) developed in collaboration with Assange.
“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 member of the AssangeDAO core team, who was responsible for the initial design of the organization’s governance structure and work, spoke with reporters 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 clarified that this could be regarded as the first historically significant event in which an NFT community contributed to releasing an individual from incarceration.
Nevertheless, they assert there can be no celebration until “everything is all settled.”
