The decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that formed to buy a rare copy of the U.S. Constitution will soon be shutting down after failing to win an auction for the document last week, despite raising over US$40 million in ETH to do so, as the Verge reports.
Fast facts
- As Forkast.News reported last week, 17,437 members of ConstitutionDAO contributed over US$40 million for the auction, which was eventually won by Ken Griffin of the hedge fund Citadel, who paid US$43.2 million at a Sotheby’s auction last Thursday. As the auction was carried out via a single representative for the DAO, there was confusion even among some of the central figures of the DAO who incorrectly thought they had won.
- Initially it seemed the DAO might remain operational by reissuing new governance tokens called We The People tokens for members who wished to stay involved with the project, but without a follow-up objective for the DAO to focus on, it was later decided the project would be shut down.
- “The community has taken all actions that it was organized to accomplish,” wrote Graham Novak, a ConstitutionDAO organizer. “We have determined that building and maintaining an ongoing project is not something that we as a core team are able to support, given the technical and administrative requirements of doing it properly.”
- Some have been quick to point out the irony of the cost of this process, as cryptocurrency is being touted as a way to lower the costs for people in some areas, such as being adopted as legal tender in El Salvador to address remittance costs, while in other contexts such as this it is still very costly to operate.
- Forkast.News also reported recently on another DAO, Krause House, that has been formed with the intention of buying an NBA team, though as of that report had only raised US$1.7 million of the billions likely required to make the purchase.