ConstitutionDAO, a community of 17,490 unique addresses, raised $46,377,897 in crowdfunded donations to bid for a first edition of The United States Constitution. Though they didn’t win, the endeavor achieved one thing for sure: fame.
Now, it’s not just crypto influencers taking note of DAOs, but crypto exchanges too.
The Constitution was directly underbid by @ConstitutionDAO, a group of 17,000+ people from around the world who banded together through social media within the last week to raise money to acquire the document, marking the largest crowdfunding initiative ever put together. (?,?)
— Sotheby's (@Sothebys) November 19, 2021
Meet PEOPLE
The crypto exchange OKEx announced that it was listing ConstitutionDAO’s PEOPLE token on its spot trading markets.
OKEx’s statement said,
“ConsitutionDAO’s goal was to win an auction for a rare copy of the US Constitution at Sothby’s, and called to the crypto world for contributions. Constitution DAO quickly attracted 17437 contributors, and raised over 47 million dollars. PEOPLE is the token that ConstitutionDAO gave to its contributors, and has become a community-owned token after it has failed to win the auction.”
Meanwhile, OKEx CEO Jay Hao shared a far more concise message.
(?, ?)
— Jay Hao | OKEx CEO (@JayHao8) November 26, 2021
As of 26 November, the token reportedly had a supply of 4,565,078,206.
Now, however, the donated funds are being given back after the DAO failed to win its bid. Data from Dune Analytics showed that 55.09% of the total raised had been returned so far. Even so, there are reports of high gas fees making this process difficult.
Pay attention, people!
While ConstitutionDAO’s members might not be poring over a first edition of the American Constitution right now, the crypto sector’s eyes are firmly on the group.
For instance, former federal prosecutor James K. Filan commented,
“Raising $40 million doesn’t seem like a stunt to me.”
Meanwhile, Bitcoin podcast host Peter McCormack highlighted how much was lost in gas fees.
Big shout out to the Ethereum team for inventing a system worse than the banks. https://t.co/3zykACX0Ae
— Peter McLasso (@PeterMcCormack) November 23, 2021
Surprisingly, Ethereum developer Tim Beiko was also far from praising the initiative. He said,
“I think ConstitutionDAO might be the DAO we most remember five years from now, probably only second to TheDAO so far…”
He further added,
“Clearly, a lot of implementation details were wrong (though _far_ less so than TheDAO […]), but feels like the first of something.”
People are waking up
At press time, PEOPLE was priced at $0.04746 on CoinMarketCap. Though the coin rankings website did not have a record of PEOPLE’s market cap, the token has already rallied by 76.41% in a day.
