NFT by crypto artist Pak to help fund Julian Assange's legal defence becomes the second most expensive NFT in the world
Anonymous crypto artist Pak along with Julian Assange recently released an NFT collection to help fund Assange’s legal defence as well as to fund other organisations fighting for freedom of information, digital privacy, education, health, as well as human and animal rights.
The NFT collection consists of two parts, namely “Clock” and “Censored”. “Clock” is a single-edition NFT that counts the number of days since Assange was arrested in April 2019.
The NFT managed to raise $52 million through a 48-hour online auction. The bid was won by AssangeDAO (decentralised autonomous organisation). More than 10,000 supporters of Assange joined AssangeDAO to fund the winning bid. All proceeds from “Clock” will be donated to the Wau Holland Foundation to support Assange’s defence.
AssangeDAO is a collective of cypherpunks that was formed last week to help free Assange. According to Artnet, DAOs operate on a blockchain and are run by a community, rather than a central governing body. It pools the financial resources of thousands of people, hence it has the ability to make large-scale financial transactions.
With that being said, “Clock” is now considered as the second most expensive NFT artwork, behind only “Everydays - The First 5000 Days” by Beeple.
The second part, “Censored”, is a pay-what-you-wish open-edition NFT where each participant could create their own work by writing a short message consisting of a maximum of 72 characters. Each contribution will be converted into an image and will be censored.
“Remember, get censored only if you want to get censored,” writes Pak. Pak also hinted that all the open editions messages will be uncensored once Assange is released.