Julian Assange Raises $52 Million With NFT Auction

Julian Assange has raised over $52 million in cryptocurrency to pay for his continuing legal defense with a digital NFT auction. The winning bid was pooled by several supporters of Assange. The journalist is incarcerated in prison in Britain currently, after spending several years in refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador in London.

The U.S. is attempting to extradite Assange in relation to 18 criminal charges against him, primarily related to espionage.

Assange founded Wikileaks in 2006, and it first gained international recognition in 2010 when it began publishing classified files obtained by the former U.S. Army analyst-turned whistleblower Chelsea Manning. Assange has since been in a global game of cat-and-mouse with various country’s authorities and is still fighting hard to resist U.S. extradition in England despite his arrest.

Given how long Assange has been making his case, it makes sense that he may need increased funds to continue. The NFT collection, called Censored, was a collaboration between Assange and the digital artist Pak.

The main piece in the collection was called Clock, which simply displays how many days Assange has been imprisoned in white text against a black background. The sale of the Clock NFT alone was worth over $52 million, or about 16,000 ether, and was bought by over 10,000 Assange supporters who pooled their money.

The group is called Assange DAO, which stands for a Decentralised Autonomous Organization. DAOs are online communities that allow users to combine money and vote on directives in a blockchain.

Assange is still waiting to find out whether the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom will take his case to trial.