A group made up of 17,437 cryptocurrency investors raised over $40 million USD to buy an ultra-rare copy of the U.S. Constitution auctioned off by Sotheby’s this week.
The group, which calls itself Constitution DAO, said it received donations “from museum curators and art directors to our grandmothers asking us what ETH is when they read about us in the news.” Within days, the group broke the record for the most money raised within a 72 hour period. Notably, a significant portion of its donations came from first-time crypto investors with wallets that were initialized for the first time. Organizers told donors that in exchange for their funding, they would receive governance tokens called $PEOPLE and would be able to collectively decide where the document should be housed.
The auction took place on Thursday at Sotheby’s in New York, with the item described as “an exceptionally rare and extraordinarily historic first printing of the United States Constitution.” It first appeared at public auction 33 years ago and is one of just 13 copies of the Official Edition of the Constitution.
According to Sotheby’s, the document was one of 500 originally issued “for submission to the Continental Congress and for the use of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention.” After an intense bidding war between the DAO and others, a private collector won the historic artifact for $43 million USD.
The group told donors that they will be refunded their pro-rata amount minus “gas fees” used to process crypto transactions through the Juicebox platform. The company said in a statement that while they didn’t end up with the document, they “made history nonetheless.”
We showed the world what crypto and web3, onboarding thousands of people in the process, including museum curators and art directors who are now excited to keep learning.
We were the first DAO @Sothebys has ever worked with, but we’re sure we won’t be the last one.
— ConstitutionDAO (?, ?) (@ConstitutionDAO) November 19, 2021
In other news, Sotheby’s will accept live bids in ETH for two Banksy artworks up for auction.
