A group of crypto enthusiasts quickly assembled and crowdfunded $47 million to bid for a rare copy the US Constitution. However, the bidder with more money won.
The group, ConstitutionDAO, said in an update on Discord that they did not win the auction at Sotheby’s tonight, which sold for a total of $43.2 million. The DAO’s organizers believed they would not have enough money to “insure, store, and transport the document” if they had made a higher bid.
The group met over the past week mostly because it seemed like a bunch on the internet buying important historical documents would be a funny thing. They managed to generate enough interest to raise a substantial amount of Ether. The organizers promise to refund all contributors, except for the Ethereum network fees.
“While this wasn’t the outcome we hoped for, we still made history tonight with ConstitutionDAO,” the organizers wrote in an update. “This is the largest crowdfund for a physical object that we are aware of—crypto or fiat. We are so incredibly grateful to have done this together with you all and are still in shock that we even got this far.”
The bidding process, which should’ve been exciting and potentially celebratory for the thousands of people who stayed on-line to watch, turned out to be chaotic. Bids were made in person by representatives who bid anonymously for potential buyers. Bidding quickly rose to $30 million and then ticked up million-by-million over the next few minutes. Two representatives slowly went back and forth, conferring by phone with the final two potential buyers.
However, it was not known which of the two representatives was bidding on behalf ConstitutionDAO. In the group’s Discord, people spammed guesses about which of the two representatives was on their side. Even after the auction ended, no one knew who won, and conflicting information trickled in through tweets, Twitter Spaces, and other social media channels.
ConstitutionDAO organizers posted an update on their website stating that they had lost the bid, more than 10 minutes after the bidding closed.
Despite the loss, the DAO’s ability to raise so much money so quickly, to garner the excitement of thousands, and to push the price up against another wealthy party is the latest example of individuals organizing at a large scale online. We’ve increasingly seen consumers join together financially to stand up to larger interests — though not always in successful or entirely coherent ways — like when a bunch of Redditors sent the stock of GameStop and a handful of other companies soaring in early 2021.
If it had succeeded, the DAO planned to determine the document’s future by vote based on governance tokens passed out to contributors and distributed through the Ethereum blockchain. The DAO is now faced with another logistical problem: $47 million in Ether must be returned and the organization that was once multi-million-dollar will be dissolved.
Source: The Verge
